The American Mosaic Journalism Prize is a journalism prize awarded annually to two freelance journalists "for excellence in long-form, narrative, or deep reporting on stories about underrepresented and/or misrepresented groups in the present American landscape". [1] [2] [3] The award is given by the Heising-Simons Foundation, a family foundation based in Los Altos and San Francisco, California. [4] [5] [6]
The American Mosaic Journalism Prize was created in 2018 by the Heising-Simons Foundation. [7] [8] [6] The winners are selected by ten judges who receive nominations from a confidential network of nominators. [9] [10] Winners are awarded an unrestricted cash prize of $100,000 each, [4] [3] making it a larger cash prize than the Pulitzer Prize (which awards $15,000 to winners). [11]
The American Mosaic Journalism Prize is directed by Brian Eule, Director of Journalism and Communications at the Heising-Simons Foundation. [12] Past judges on the judging panel include Wesley Lowery (2018-2024), Katherine Boo (2022-2024), Hannah Allam (2018, 2019, 2021, 2022), Stephanie Foo (2020, 2023, 2024), Sam Freedman (2019, 2020), Farai Chideya (2023), Cindi Leive (2022), Mirta Ojito (2019, 2021), Sewell Chan (2024), Rose Arce (2024), Alexis Madrigal (2024), and Antonia Hylton (2019-2024), among others.
In late February 2023, it was announced Cerise Castle had signed with CAA. [43] In late 2023, Cerise began reporting on the Temecula school district in California for Capital & Main. [44]
Darcy published a piece about essential delivery workers for The Atlantic in June 2020.
In June 2021, David joined The Undefeated as a full-time senior writer covering music for the culture vertical of the ESPN multimedia content initiative on sports, race, and culture. [45]
In May 2022, David published a book with HarperCollins titled, “The Movement Made Us,” about his father's experience as part of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. [46]
Valeria recently published a personal story for PRI's “The World” about getting vaccinated for COVID-19 while being pregnant in May, 2021. Additionally, in May 2021, she began airing a new radio show, “Comadres al Aire”.
palabra., a growing multimedia platform supporting National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) freelance journalist members, named Valeria editor in 2021. [47] In January 2022, Valeria was named a Fellow for the Emerson Collective to launch Altavoz Lab, a collaborative project within palabra. to strengthen reporting at community outlets that serve people of color and immigrants. [48]
In June 2021, Michelle's piece, “The Media Isn’t Ready to Cover Climate Apartheid”, which was among the pieces featured by the American Mosaic Journalism Award judges, was selected as a winner for the 2021 Covering Climate Now award. [49]
As of December 2021, Michelle is working on a book titled "Anima Sola" with Viking Books. [50]
In May, 2020, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah entered into a book deal with Random House. [51] The book, The Explainers and the Explorers, which is Rachel's first full-length work of non-fiction, will “be a two-volume, broad-sweeping work about the black experience in America, from its very beginnings to the current day,” according to Random House. [51]
As of April, 2022, Ryan has been accepted into a doctoral program in Social Anthropology at Harvard University. [52] He will conduct visual research on how hostile environments, water, and air are impacting Latino communities across the American West. [53]
In 2022, Ryan served on the photography jury for the 2021-2022 Pulitzer photojournalism winners. [54]
In June 2021, Jaeah was named as a 2021-2022 Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellow at the University of Michigan. [55]
In August 2021, Jaeah's article “Why Was Vicha Ratanapakdee Killed?” was published in The New York Times Magazine and in April 2022 Jaeah's opinion article “This Rap Song Helped Sentence a 17-Year-Old to Prison for Life” was published in The New York Times .
The second season of Rebecca Nagle's podcast series “This Land,” for which she won the Prize in 2020, was released at the end of August 2021. [56] The podcast's second season focused on how the far right is using Native children to quietly dismantle American Indian tribes and advance a conservative agenda.
Rebecca was an awardee at the 2021 Women's Media Center Exceptional Journalism Awards in December 2021. [57]
Rebecca's book “Indian Territory” will be published in 2022 under HarperCollins. [58] Additionally, in April 2022, Rebecca Nagle co-authored the article “Where Is Oklahoma Getting Its Numbers From in Its Supreme Court Case?” in The Atlantic with Allison Herrera. The article was cited by Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayer on April 28, 2022, during arguments in the Supreme Court case Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta . [59] [60]
Julian Brave NoiseCat is currently working on a book, "We Survived the Night", which will be published by Knopf and is an account of contemporary Indigenous life in the U.S. and Canada woven together with a personal narrative. [61]
Julian gave the 2022 Commencement Charge of the Class speech for University of Michigan’s Ford School in April 2022. [62] In August 2022, Julian published "Z’s coming out: At a two-spirit powwow in Toronto, my niece grapples with identity" in Canada's National Observer.
Julian’s documentary, made in partnership with Emily Kassie, Sugarcane premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. [63] At the festival, Julian and Emily Kassie won the Sundance Directing Award for the film. [64]
In May 2021, Abe published a piece in The New Yorker exploring how violent police officers remain in law enforcement. [65]
In September 2021, Abe published his book "Brothers on Three" with MacMillan Publishers. [66] The book is an expansion on one of the pieces Abe won the Prize for in 2019, “What the Arlee Warriors Were Playing For”, and is the story of coming of age on Montana's Flathead Indian Reservation and a basketball team uniting a community during a suicide epidemic. "Brothers on Three" won the 2021 Montana Book Award, and the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona General Nonfiction Book Award. [66]
In October 2023, Carvell Wallace’s article “The Abundant Joy of Ayesha McGowan” was published in Bicycling . Carvell's book, "Another Word for Love", will be published by Macmillan in May 2024. [67]
Farai Chideya is an American novelist, multimedia journalist, and radio host. She produced and hosted Pop and Politics with Farai Chideya, a series of radio specials on politics for 15 years. She is the creator and host of the podcast Our Body Politic, which launched in September 2020.
Mirta Ojito is a Cuban-born author and journalist. She has written two nonfiction books, Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus a book about her journey to the U.S. as a teenager in the Mariel boatlift, and Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town." She was part of a group of New York Times reporters who shared the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2001 for a series of articles about race in America. More recently, she was a member of the Telemundo team that won an Emmy for the coverage of Pope Francis's visit to the Americas.
Samuel G. Freedman is an American author and journalist and currently a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Julian Rubinstein December 27, 1968 is an American journalist, documentary filmmaker and educator. He is best known for his longform magazine journalism and his non-fiction books, Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, which chronicles the life of one of the world's most popular living folk heroes and The Holly: Five Bullets, One Gun and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood, a multi-generational story of activism and gang violence in a gentrifying northeast Denver community. While reporting The Holly, he began filming THE HOLLY, a feature documentary, which captures significant problems in a federal anti-gang effort and the targeted takedown of an activist.
Jim Nelson is an American journalist, known for his tenure as editor-in-chief of the magazine GQ.
Sewell Chan is an American journalist who is the editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune. Prior to that he was the editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times, where he oversaw the editorial board and the Op-Ed and Sunday Opinion pages of the newspaper. Chan also worked at The New York Times from 2004 to 2018.
A Simon Rockower Award is an award presented by the American Jewish Press Association for "Excellence in Jewish Journalism", at a banquet in November each year.
Katherine "Kate" J. Boo is an American investigative journalist who has documented the lives of people in poverty. She has won the MacArthur "genius" award (2002) and the National Book Award for Nonfiction (2012), and her work earned the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for The Washington Post. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 2003. Her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity won nonfiction prizes from PEN, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in addition to the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Rose Arce is Executive Producer of Starfish Media Group, the production company of television journalist Soledad O'Brien. She was formerly a Senior Producer at CNN. Arce graduated from Barnard College in 1986. She shared a Pulitzer Prize with a colleague in 1992 while a reporter at New York Newsday, and has also won two Emmys for news reporting at WCBS-TV.
The European Press Prize is a non-profit foundation based in the Netherlands. It runs a programme of journalism awards of the same name for journalists from 46 countries, the Council of Europe, Belarus and Russia. As part of the programme, a jury awards prizes in five categories each year. These are Distinguished Reporting, Innovation, Investigative Reporting, Migration Journalism and Public Discourse. In addition, the jury also awards a special prize for outstanding journalism that transcends categories and disciplines.
Alexis Madrigal is an American journalist. He co-hosts KQED's Forum on California Public Radio.
Hannah Allam is an award-winning Egyptian American journalist and reporter who frequently covers the Middle East.
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is an American essayist. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2018 for her profile of white supremacist and mass murderer Dylann Roof, as well as a National Magazine Award. She was also a National Magazine Award finalist in 2014 for her profile of elusive comedian Dave Chappelle. Her first book, The Explainers and the Explorers, is forthcoming from Random House.
Stephanie Foo is a Malaysia-born American radio journalist, producer and author. She has worked for Snap Judgment and This American Life. In 2022, she published What My Bones Know, a memoir about healing from complex PTSD.
Wesley Lowery is an American journalist who has worked at both CBS News and The Washington Post. He was a lead on the Post's "Fatal Force" project that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2016 as well as the author of They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement. In 2017, he became a CNN political contributor and in 2020 was announced as a correspondent for 60 in 6, a short-form spinoff of 60 Minutes for Quibi. Lowery is a former Fellow at Georgetown University's Institute of Politics and Public Service.
This Land is an American political podcast produced and distributed by Crooked Media and Cadence13, and hosted by Rebecca Nagle. The podcast debuted on June 3, 2019 and follows the United States Supreme Court case Sharp v. Murphy. In addition, the podcast discusses various Native issues such as land rights, sovereignty issues, and the Indian Child Welfare Act.
Jaeah Lee is an independent American journalist who writes primarily about justice, race, and labor in America. She is the recipient of the inaugural American Mosaic Journalism Prize, the 2018 Los Angeles Literary Award and was a Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellow at the University of Michigan. Her reporting work on the racial bias of using rap lyrics as evidence in criminal prosecutions has drawn attention to the acknowledgement of rap as protected speech under the First Amendment, particularly in California.
The Heising-Simons Foundation is a private foundation established by philanthropists Elizabeth (Liz) Simons and Mark Heising in Los Altos, California in 2007. The Heising-Simons Foundation's board consists of Liz Simons, Mark Heising, their daughter Caitlin Heising, and Sushma Raman. Liz Simons and Mark Heising signed the Giving Pledge in 2016.
Cerise Castle is an American journalist. She received the IWMF Courage in Journalism Award and the American Mosaic Journalism Prize for her investigative series on deputy gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, filmmaker, and activist who is an enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'secen of the Secwepemc (Shuswap) Nation in the Canadian province of British Columbia. He is a public thinker and advocate on issues of climate justice and Indigenous rights in North America.