Sarah Stillman

Sarah Stillman is an American professor, staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist focusing on immigration policy, the criminal justice system, and the impacts of climate change on workers. Stillman won a National Magazine Award in 2012 for her reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan and again in 2019 for her article in The New Yorker on deportation as a death sentence. She won a 2012 George Polk Award for her reporting on the high-risk use of young people as confidential informants in the war on drugs, and a second Polk Award in 2021 for coverage of migrant workers and climate change. She also won the 2012 Hillman Prize. In 2016, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. She won a 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for her coverage inThe New Yorker about troubling injustices in felony murder prosecutions in the U.S.

Her investigative reporting has shed light on profiteering in key areas of U.S. life, particularly prisons and jails; immigration detention facilities; disaster recovery programs; and U.S. war zone contracting. She has written in-depth stories on the return of debtors’ prisons, the police use and abuse of civil asset forfeiture, family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border, and more.

She runs the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab, a collaborative public-interest journalism project that seeks to deepen coverage of criminal justice, climate change, migration, and mental health. Stillman also teaches narrative non-fiction at Yale University’s English Department.

In 2016, Stillman became founding director of the Global Migration Program at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she taught a course on “Gender and Migration” and mentored post-graduate fellows on a range of refugee-related reporting projects.

The rights to a number of her articles in The New Yorker have been sold to Hollywood filmmakers and studios, including her story on confidential informants, which was acquired in 2014 by Paramount Pictures and Oscar-winning writer/producer William Monahan.

Stillman was elected in 2020 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which includes “world leaders in the arts and sciences, business, philanthropy, and public affairs … who promote nonpartisan recommendations that advance the public good.”

Education
Stillman graduated from Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C., and graduated summa cum laude with exceptional distinction from Yale University in 2006. While in college, she founded and edited an interdisciplinary feminist journal, Manifesta, and co-directed the Student Legal Action Movement, a group devoted to reforming the American prison system. At Yale, Stillman taught poetry and writing at to inmates at the men’s maximum-security prison in Cheshire, CT.

Stillman was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University. In 2009, she was embedded with the 116th Military Police Company.

She was a visiting scholar at New York University and has taught at Columbia University and at Yale University. She is also a staff writer for The New Yorker.

Awards
In 2005, Stillman was awarded the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics.

She was the recipient of the inaugural Reporting Award from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University in 2010.

Stillman won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Public Interest for her reporting for The New Yorker from Iraq and Afghanistan on labor abuses and human trafficking on United States military bases. She won a second National Magazine Award for Public Interest in 2021 for her article in The New Yorker on the deaths of immigrants deported by the U.S.

She is also the recipient of the Overseas Press Club's Joe and Laurie Dine Award for international human-rights reporting, the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism, and the Michael Kelly Award.

Stillman won the 2013 Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York for in-depth reporting on police who seize citizens’ assets without trial in a process called civil forfeiture. She also won the Molly National Journalism Prize in 2013.

Stillman received the New America Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for her reporting in 2015 on the lucrative migrant-extortion industry in the U.S. border region. “Stillman took great risks to accompany migrants along the dangerous 3,000-mile trail from Central America through Mexico to the United States,” the award citation stated.

In 2016, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded Stillman a MacArthur fellowship.

She reported and voiced “The Essential Workers of the Climate Crisis” for WNYC Studios, which won the national Edward R. Murrow Award for best radio news documentary in 2022.

In 2020, her essay “Like a Monarch” appeared in All We Can Save, a collection of essays and poetry that highlights a wide range of women's voices in the environmental movement. Stillman’s work also appears in The Best American Magazine Writing 2012 and The Best American Magazine Writing 2017.

In 2024, as a staff writer of The New Yorker, she won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for her coverage of troubling injustices in felony murder prosecutions in the U.S.