The New Yorker Wins Two 2024 Pulitzer Prizes

The New Yorker Wins Two 2024 Pulitzer Prizes

Two works published by The New Yorker received Pulitzer Prizes today, placing them among the year's top achievements in journalism, letters, music, and drama.

Sarah Stillman, a staff writer, won in the explanatory reporting category for her deeply reported investigation into felony murder, a draconian legal doctrine that has sent thousands of Americans-disproportionately young and Black-to prison, sometimes for life, for killings they didn't commit. In its citation, the Pulitzer committee praised Stillman's "searing indictment of our legal system's reliance on the felony-murder charge and its disparate consequences, often devastating, for communities of color."

Medar de la Cruz, a contributor, won in the illustrated reporting and commentary category for his revealing look at the unseen lives of New Yorkers detained at Rikers Island, where cameras and phones are banned. De la Cruz's evocative drawings document his year as a library worker delivering books to inmates in the notorious jail complex. In honoring de la Cruz, the Pulitzer board lauded his "bold black-and-white images that humanize the prisoners and staff through their hunger for books."

Stillman has written for The New Yorker since 2011, on topics including human trafficking, the drug trade, and labor conditions at factories overseas. Her work has received two National Magazine Awards, a George Polk Award, and a Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism. Stillman, a 2016 MacArthur Fellow, teaches investigative reporting at Yale and created the Global Migration Project at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

De la Cruz, a graduate of the Art Center College of Design, teaches visual communications at community workshops in New York City, and is working on a graphic novel about his experiences on Rikers Island. His Pulitzer-winning New Yorker contribution marked his first submission to the magazine.

Three New Yorker contributors were named Pulitzer finalists. Staff writer Jay Caspian Kang was recognized in the commentary category for his columns that explored the gulf between real-world injustices and the ways that we talk about them, including writing on the failed promise of affirmative action for Asian Americans and the racial politics of the N.B.A. Staff writer Vinson Cunningham was recognized in the criticism category for a 2023 body of work that weaved astute analysis of plays and musicals with poignant meditations on life and death, art and politics, and identity and race. And Angie Wang was recognized in the illustrated reporting category for an imaginative Sketchbook that compared the language-development skills of ChatGPT to those of her young son.

Additionally, The New Yorker's Justin Chang, who joined the magazine in February, won in the criticism category for his writing about film at the Los Angeles Times.

The New Yorker has now won eight Pulitzer Prizes, including the gold medal for public service, since the Pulitzer Board opened the prize to magazines in 2014.