Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University

The Reporting Award

Reporting Award Recipients

Seth Freed Wessler
2013 Winner

Seth Freed Wessler has reported from across the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean on immigration, criminal justice, economic inequality and the social safety net. As a reporter for Colorlines.com, Wessler won a Sidney Hillman Prize and other honors for his investigative stories that revealed there are thousands of U.S. citizen children in local foster care whose immigrant parent has been deported. He was the recipient of the 2009 USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism fellowship and has written for Good Magazine, The Texas Observer, NPR's Latino USA and other outlets. For five years, Wessler was a senior researcher at the Applied Research Center where he authored reports on racial and economic inequality.

 

Liza Gross
2013 Second Place Winner

Gross is a freelance journalist and part-time editor at the journal PLOS Biology, a contributor to Environmental Health News (EHN) and blogger for KQED Science, Northern California’s public media outlet. She’s also a contributor to the just released The Science Writers’ Handbook. Her work, which focuses mostly on conservation, environment and health issues, has appeared in diverse outlets, including The Washington Post, Scientific American, High Country News and San Francisco Chronicle. Her story “No beba el agua,” which showed how decades of nitrate contamination from California’s $37 billion farming industry disproportionately affects poor Latino farm workers, is part of EHN’s Pollution, Poverty, People of Color series, which received Honorable Mention in the Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism.

 

Lisa Armstrong
2012 Winner

Lisa Armstrong is an award-winning journalist with credits in several publications, including The Washington Post, Parade, National Geographic, Essence, and O, The Oprah Magazine.  In addition to an M.A. in journalism from NYU, Armstrong has a master’s degree in urban planning with a concentration in international development.

Armstrong grew up in Nairobi, Kenya and has worked in Ethiopia, India, Zimbabwe, Tajikistan and several other countries, writing stories mostly about humanitarian issues. She has written about teenage prostitution in the IDP camps in Haiti, and former child soldiers in Liberia. She won an award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors for an article about a Kenyan village formed by women who were allegedly raped by British soldiers, and subsequently banished by their husbands.

In February 2010, Armstrong received a grant from The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for a yearlong reporting project in Haiti.

 

Jina Moore
2011 Winner

Moore is a freelance journalist and recipient of The Reporting Award for 2011. A correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, she writes most frequently on human rights, foreign affairs, and Africa. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, Newsweek, The Columbia Journalism Review, and on National Public Radio’s World Vision Report, and other venues. Her “Reading the Wounds,” about doctors who treat torture survivors, was included in Best American Science Writing (2009). A summa cum laude graduate of Boston University, Moore earned master’s degrees from the School of International and Public Affairs and the Graduate School of Journalism, both a Columbia University. She is a recent Fulbright Fellow in Journalism and a two-time grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

 

Sarah Stillman
2010 Winner

Stillman, a freelance journalist who was an embedded journalist in Iraq, is the inaugural recipient of The Reporting Award. In 2008, Stillman traveled to Iraq as a foreign correspondent for TruthDig, where she embedded with the 116th Military Police Company. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, the Dallas Morning News, and other outlets. A summa cum laude graduate of Yale University, Stillman went on to pursue her doctorate as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford. More recently, she traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan for The New Yorker to report on the false recruitment and human trafficking of third-world workers on U.S. military bases.  Her Reporting Award story prompted Congressional hearings and an amendment to the Defense Department Appropriations Bill prohibiting the use of Department funds for human trafficking; the piece was a finalist for the Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting.