Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she covers criminal justice reform, immigration, and other social issues. She also runs the Global Migration Project at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, guiding team investigations at the intersections of gender and immigration. In a recent New Yorker piece, “When Deportation is a Death Sentence,” she worked with her Columbia team to gather the stories of more than sixty individuals who were deported to death or harm across Central America and Mexico. She is a 2016 MacArthur Fellow.
Stillman got her start covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a focus on the trafficking of foreign workers to serve U.S. troops in both conflict zones. In 2012, Stillman won a National Magazine Award for her reporting on abuses of these war- zone workers, 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. 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, 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.