Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she covers criminal justice, immigration, climate change, and more. She teaches narrative non-fiction at Yale, where she also runs the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab. She is a MacArthur Fellow.
Stillman's work often focuses on profiteering -- in prisons, jails, immigration detention facilities, and conflict zones. Recently, she's been reporting on extreme sentencing, winning a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for her coverage of the injustices resulting from the felony-murder rule, and running a project with the Lab to document extreme sentencing in collaboration with local newsrooms nationwide. (You can check out the Felony Murder Reporting Project here.) Stillman joined The New Yorker in 2012; that same year, her piece about labor abuses on United States military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, "The Invisible Army," received the National Magazine Award for public interest and the Hillman Prize for magazine journalism. In 2019, she received another National Magazine Award for public interest, for her 2018 New Yorker piece, “No Refuge,” which documented how deportation can become a death sentence for asylum-seekers and other immigrants.
A contributor to the best-selling anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, Stillman is currently reporting on the ways that climate change, migration, and labor intersect, as well as on communities pushing back against the injustices in county jails around the country. She is also interested in the consequences of privatizing basic government services, particularly in the justice system.