Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University

Reporting Award Recipients

Sarah Stillman

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    Reporting Award Winner Sarah Stillman: The recipient of NYU Carter Journalism Institute’s Inaugural "Reporting Award"

Sarah Stillman, recipient of the Carter Journalism Institute's inaugural Reporting Award, has won a 2012 National Magazine Award and a 2012 Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism for the article she wrote under the Institute's sponsorship. Her piece, which appeared in the June 6, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, exposed the poor treatment of foreign workers on U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sarah Stillman is a New York-based journalist whose reporting on Iraq and Afghanistan has appeared in The Washington Post, Slate, The Nation, The Atlantic.com, The New Republic.com, and The Dallas Morning News. In 2008, she traveled to Iraq as a foreign correspondent for TruthDig.com, where she embedded with the 116th Military Police Company.  More recently, she returned to Iraq – and made her first trip to Kandahar, Afghanistan – to report on such varied issues as the role of third-world service workers on U.S. military bases, the state of Iraqi women’s and youth prisons, and the changing nature of mortuary affairs in Afghanistan.

As a visiting fellow at Yale’s Morse College, Stillman recently taught a course on the Iraq war with a U.S. Army captain.  She also taught creative writing for four years at Cheshire Correctional Institute, a maximum-security men’s prison in Connecticut.  A summa cum laude graduate of Yale and winner of the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics, she went on to pursue her doctorate as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford.  She has received grants and fellowships to study topics including dagongmei (“working girls”) in southern China, returned refugee communities in rural Guatemala, and African Union soldiers who served as peacekeepers in Darfur, Sudan.  Her first book, an advice guide for young women, has been published in five languages and was recently reissued by Simon and Schuster.
 

Some recent articles to come out of The Reporting Award:

“The Invisible Army,” The New Yorker

A New Yorker piece appearing in June 2011 about the recruitment and treatment of foreign workers employed as support staff on American military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tells about Vinnie Tuivaga and Lydia Qeraniu, two women from Fiji who were recruited in 2007 by a local firm called Meridian Services Agency, which promised them jobs in Dubai. Once they reached Dubai, however, they were told that they were actually bound for jobs on U.S. military bases in Iraq. Lydia and Vinnie were unwitting recruits for the Pentagon’s invisible army: more than seventy thousand cooks, cleaners, construction workers, fast-food clerks, electricians, and beauticians from the world’s poorest countries who service U.S. military logistics contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) is behind most of the commercial “tastes of home” that can be found on major U.S. bases, which include jewelry stores, souvenir shops, beauty salons, and fast-food courts.

 

“In Baghdad with the Louisiana National Guard,” Slate.com

As part of Slate’s “special issue” on the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Stillman
profiles a Louisiana National Guard unit running a surreal hotel for politicians, generals, and celebrities at Camp Victory, Baghdad.  While on their previous tour of Iraq in 2005, most of the unit lost their homes – and, in some cases, their jobs and loved ones – in Hurricane Katrina.  This summer, while stationed in Baghdad, the same brigade watched as the BP oil spill threatened their livelihoods 7,000 miles away.

 

“Tea and Politics: Scenes from the New, Awkward Iraq,” The Atlantic.com

Since the official end of major combat operations in Iraq, Stillman asks: how, exactly, do U.S. soldiers continue to lose their lives in a “done” war?  She offers an up-close look at an ambitious form of soldiering-turned-diplomacy known as the “key-leader engagement” (KLE), an increasingly central part of the U.S. military’s long-term strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan.  This winter, Sgt. David J. Luff was killed by a sniper on a KLE in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit; Stillman reports back from her own journey through the same hardscrabble neighborhood to attend a KLE, offering snapshots from the new, awkward war in Iraq.