Sarah Stillman
Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker where she covers migration, mass incarceration, climate justice, and more. She is also the director of the Global Migration Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, which has produced more than thirty public-interest investigations with more than a dozen outlets. She has written on topics ranging from civil forfeiture to debtors’ prisons and from Mexico’s drug cartels to Bangladesh’s garment-factory workers. She won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Public Interest for her reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan on labor abuses and human trafficking on United States military bases, and also received the Michael Kelly Award, the Overseas Press Club’s Joe and Laurie Dine Award for international human-rights reporting, and the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism. Her reporting on the high-risk use of young people as confidential informants in the war on drugs received a George Polk Award and the Molly National Journalism Prize. In 2019, she won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest for her New Yorker piece “No Refuge,” which documented how deportation can become a death sentence for asylum-seekers and other immigrants.
She is a contributor to the best-selling anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. She is currently reporting on the labor dimensions of the climate crisis, including the role of immigrant resilience workers in rebuilding after extreme weather events.
Before joining The New Yorker, Stillman wrote about America’s wars overseas and the challenges facing soldiers at home for the Washington Post, The Nation, newrepublic.com, Slate, and theatlantic.com. She co-taught a seminar at Yale on the Iraq War, and also ran a creative-writing workshop for four years at the Cheshire Correctional Institution, a maximum-security men’s prison in Connecticut. Her work is included in “The Best American Magazine Writing 2012.” She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016.