Rozina ALI is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. She is a fellow at Type Media Center and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, where she is working on a book about the history of Islamophobia in the United States
Ken Armstrong, a reporter at ProPublica since 2017, has won Pulitzer Prizes for Explanatory Reporting (2016) and Investigative Reporting (2012) and has shared in two staff Pulitzers for Breaking News Reporting (2010, 2015). One of his stories, written with T. Christian Miller, became an eight-part Netflix series, Unbelievable, and a This American Life episode, both of which won Peabody Awards. With the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Raquel Rutledge, Armstrong wrote “The Landlord and the Tenant,” winner of the 2023 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. Armstrong previously worked at the Marshall Project, the Seattle Times, and the Chicago Tribune, where his reporting with Steve Mills helped prompt the Illinois governor to suspend executions and empty death row. His book with Nick Perry, Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity, won the 2011 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Fact Crime. Armstrong, a graduate of Purdue University, has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and the McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University. In 2009 he received the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Allison P. Davis is a features writer for New York and The Cut. She writes profiles, long-form features, essays, and columns that explore culture in the broadest sense of the word.
Michelle De Kretser’s most recent novel is Scary Monsters.
Caitlin Dickerson is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Previously, she was a national immigration reporter for the New York Times. She is the recipient of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting and the 2023 Livingston Award for “We Need to Take Away Children.” She has also received Peabody and Edward R. Murrow awards for her investigative reporting.
Nicholas Florko is the commercial determinants of health reporter for Stat, where he investigates the ways business decisions impact public health. He has also covered health-care politics and policy for Stat in Washington, including how rationing of care in the carceral system exacerbates existing health disparities. His investigation into the human toll of substandard hepatitis C care in state prisons was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Public Interest, the Livingston Award for National Reporting, and an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award.
Chris Heath is a writer based in Brooklyn. He previously appeared in this anthology series in 2006 with “The Last Outlaw,” about the country legend Merle Haggard, and in 2013 with “18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars, 2 Wolves, 1 Baboon, 1 Macaque, and 1 Man Dead in Ohio,” a tragic odyssey within the world of personal zoos.
Jazmine Hughes is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine. She won the 2023 National Magazine Award for Profile Writing.
Nate Jones is a senior writer at Vulture and New York, where he has worked since 2014. He writes the weekly “Oscar Futures” column.
ESPN senior writer Tom Junod has written some of the most enduring and widely read longform journalism of the last thirty years. He joined ESPN in 2016 and has specialized in deeply reported stories on subjects ranging from Muhammad Ali’s funeral to Tom Brady’s desire to play forever. He has been nominated for an Emmy for his work on “The Hero of Goodall Park,” an E60 program on the ancient secrets that were revealed when a car drove on a baseball field in Maine during a Babe Ruth League game in 2018. In a 2022 piece, “Untold,” he and ESPN investigative reporter Paula Lavigne spent nearly two years uncovering the horrific crimes of Todd Hodne, a Penn State football player who in the late 1970s terrorized State College, Pennsylvania, and Long Island, New York. Before coming to ESPN, Junod wrote for GQ and Esquire, where he won two National Magazine Awards. For Esquire’s seventy-fifth anniversary, the editors of the magazine selected his 9/11 story “The Falling Man” as one of the seven top stories in Esquire’s history. In 2019, his story on the beloved children’s television host Fred Rogers, “Can You Say … Hero?,” served as the basis for the movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, starring Tom Hanks and Matthew Rhys. He has also written for The Atlantic. Junod’s work has been widely anthologized in collections including The Best American Magazine Writing, The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Political Writing, The Best American Crime Writing, and The Best American Food Writing. Junod has won a James Beard Award for an essay about his mother’s cooking and is working on a memoir about his father for Doubleday. Born and raised on Long Island, he lives in Marietta, Georgia, with his wife and daughter.
Raffi Khatchadourian has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2008. He covers a wide range of topics, including science, art, politics, foreign affairs, and national security.
As part of ESPN’s investigative unit since 2008, Paula Lavigne has reported on a variety of stories in sports at all levels, from youth sports to college and professional teams to international competitions. Her work appears on multiple ESPN platforms for digital, audio, and television. Lavigne has investigated sexual assault, gender equity, and Title IX failures in college athletics programs. Her skills in acquiring and mining public records and data have led to deep dives into analyzing crimes among professional and college athletes, fan food safety at professional ballparks, fraudulent pro-athlete charities, imbalances in gender equity, compromised athlete medical care, and college sports finances. Lavigne received a Sports Emmy and was an Investigative Reporters and Editors Awards finalist for her work alongside reporter Tom Junod in investigating a Penn State football player who was a serial rapist and murderer, which led to the digital story “Untold” and the film Betsy & Irv. She received a Peabody Award for her work investigating sexual assaults within the Michigan State University athletics program and an Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award for an investigation into a youth football gambling ring. Lavigne is also the coauthor, with Mark Schlabach, of Violated: Exposing Rape at Baylor University Amid College Football’s Sexual Assault Crisis. Before joining ESPN, Lavigne worked as a reporter and data analyst for the Des Moines Register, the Dallas Morning News, and the News-Tribune in Tacoma, Washington. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and an MBA from Creighton University and is a frequent speaker at journalism symposiums and conferences.
Samantha Michaels is the criminal-justice reporter for Mother Jones.
Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual and conceptual artist and an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a social anthropologist and the author of To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua (2023). Her work has been published in make/shift’s Feminisms in Motion: Voices for Justice, Liberation, and Transformation; The Best American Travel Writing 2020; Stranger’s Guide; and Jacobin.
Natasha Pearlman is the executive editor of Glamour. She is the recipient of the National Magazine Award for Public Interest.
Raquel Rutledge is the investigations editor for The Examination. She joined the nonprofit start-up in April after nineteen years as an investigative reporter and deputy editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where she covered a variety of subjects, from health and science to crime and taxes. Her investigation into fraud in Wisconsin’s day-care subsidy program won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. In 2011, Rutledge was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, studying food regulation. The following year she led an investigation into a Wisconsin company responsible for tainted alcohol wipes linked to the death of a two-year-old boy. The series, “Shattered Trust,” won a Gerald Loeb Award and other national accolades. More recently, Rutledge uncovered how a chemical known to cause deadly lung disease is endangering coffee workers and those who use e-cigarettes. In addition, her investigations into deaths and injuries of tourists in Mexico and the dangers barrel-recycling plants pose to workers and nearby residents were honored with national awards. In 2020, Rutledge helped expose how hospitals fail to protect nurses and other staff from serious—sometimes deadly—workplace violence while instead focusing expenditures on building aesthetics and executive pay. That work, too, earned national recognition, including being named a finalist for a Gerald Loeb Award. In 2022, Rutledge led an investigation into electrical fires in Milwaukee, uncovering how they hit Black renters hardest and how lawmakers and regulators do little to address the problem. That series, “Wires and Fires,” was named a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Most recently, she partnered with Ken Armstrong of ProPublica to coauthor “The Landlord and the Tenant,” which won a 2023 National Magazine Award.
Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer and professor of English at Harvard University. She is the author of Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014), The Old Drift: A Novel (2019), Stranger Faces (2020), and The Furrows: An Elegy (2022).
Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the new poetry collection Above Ground. He is also the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and of the New York Times number-one 1 best-selling book How the Word Is Passed. He is the host of the Crash Course Black American History YouTube series.
Natalie So is a writer, researcher, and story producer who works at the intersection of true stories and TV. Her past projects include research and development for Little America, The OA, A League of Their Own, and the forthcoming limited series Retreat. She lives in San Francisco.
Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker. Previously, she was the deputy editor of Jezebel and a contributing editor at The Hairpin. Her first book, the essay collection Trick Mirror, was published in 2019.
Ruhama Wolle is the special projects editor at Glamour.