The Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism is an annual literary award for "a journalist whose work has brought public attention to important issues", awarded by the New York Public Library. It was established in 1987 in memory of journalist Helen Bernstein, and there is a cash award of $15,000. [1]
Jane Meredith Mayer is an American investigative journalist who has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1995. She has written for the publication about money in politics; government prosecution of whistleblowers; the United States Predator drone program; Donald Trump's ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz; and Trump's financial backer, Robert Mercer. In 2016, Mayer's book Dark Money—in which she investigated the history of the conservative fundraising Koch brothers—was published to critical acclaim.
Jessica Nordell is an American writer, science journalist, and author.
Philip Gourevitch, an American author and journalist, is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and a former editor of The Paris Review.
Charlie Savage is an American author and newspaper reporter with The New York Times. In 2007, when employed by The Boston Globe, he was a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. He writes about national security legal policy, including presidential power, surveillance, drone strikes, torture, secrecy, leak investigations, military commissions, war powers, and the U.S. war on terrorism prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
David Quammen is an American writer focusing on science, nature, and travel. He is the author of fifteen books. Quammen's articles have appeared in Outside, National Geographic, Harper's Magazine, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and other periodicals.
Dana Louise Priest is an American journalist, writer and teacher. She has worked for nearly 30 years for the Washington Post and became the third John S. and James L. Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism in 2014. Before becoming a full-time investigative reporter at the Post, Priest specialized in intelligence reporting and wrote many articles on the U.S. "War on terror" and was the newspaper's Pentagon correspondent. In 2006 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting citing "her persistent, painstaking reports on secret "black site" prisons and other controversial features of the government's counter-terrorism campaign." The Washington Post won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, citing the work of reporters Priest and Anne Hull and photographer Michel du Cille "exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, evoking a national outcry and producing reforms by federal officials."
Christina Lamb OBE is a British journalist and author. She is the chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times.
The Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) is a division of the American Library Association.
Isabel Wilkerson is an African-American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
Dan Fagin is an American journalist who specializes in environmental science. He won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for his best-selling book Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. Toms River also won the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, the National Academies Communication Award, and the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award of the Society of Environmental Journalists, among other literary prizes.
Shane Bauer is an American journalist, best known for his undercover reporting for Mother Jones magazine. He has won several awards including the Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and the National Magazine Award for Best Reporting.
Patricia Chanco Evangelista is a Filipina trauma journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Manila, whose coverage focuses mostly on conflict, disaster and human rights. She is a multimedia reporter for online news agency Rappler and is a writer-at-large for Esquire magazine. Her first book, Some People Need Killing, came out in 2023.
Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them is a book by Donovan Hohn concerning 28,800 plastic ducks and other toys, known as the Friendly Floatees, which were washed overboard from a container ship in the Pacific Ocean on 10 January 1992 and have subsequently been found on beaches around the world and used by oceanographers including Curtis Ebbesmeyer to trace ocean currents.
Tom Wilber is an American journalist and public speaker who specializes in environmental issues. During 25 years with Gannett's USA Today Network, he won multiple individual and team Best of Gannett honors for coverage of issues ranging from catastrophic flooding in upstate New York to impacts of shale gas development in New York and Pennsylvania. His 2012 book, Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale, was selected as a finalist for the 2013 New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. He has taught newspaper journalism at Binghamton University, and holds a master's degree from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications program at Syracuse University.
Nina Bernstein is an American journalist, best known for her New York Times reporting on social and legal issues, including coverage of immigration, child welfare and health care. In 21 years at the Times, from which she retired at the end of 2016, she was a metro reporter, a national correspondent and an investigative reporter.
Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation is a 2013 non-fiction book by the American author Dan Fagin. It is about the dumping of industrial pollution by chemical companies including Ciba-Geigy, in Toms River, New Jersey, beginning in 1952 through the 1980s, and the epidemiological investigations of a cancer cluster that subsequently emerged there. The book won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, the 2014 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the 2014 National Academies Communication Award.
Thank You for Your Service, written by the American journalist David Finkel, is the follow-up non-fiction book to The Good Soldiers, which chronicles the lives of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion in Baghdad during 2007 and 2008. With this sequel, Finkel examines the soldiers' lives back home in the United States as they struggle to readjust to family and civilian life. The book was published in 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway — and Its Aftermath is a non-fiction book by Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad. It was adapted into the 2018 American film 22 July by English writer and director Paul Greengrass.
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City is a book written by Andrea Elliott.
Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country is a 2023 book by journalist Patricia Evangelista, published by Random House. The book documents the thousands of Filipinos killed by extrajudicial death squads and vigilantes during the administration of the president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte.