Congratulations 2025 ASJA Awards Winners!

As a co-chair of the American Society of Journalists and Authors Awards committee, I’m thrilled to announce the winners and honorable mention recipients of the 2025 ASJA Awards for articles and content, which recognize exceptional nonfiction freelance writing published in 2024.

The full list of winners and honorable mentions appears below. You can also see the full list on the 2025 ASJA Awards page of the ASJA website along with the judges’ explanations of why they made their selections.

ASJA members and non-members submitted over 300 articles and content writing works in 21 categories, including a new, timely one: Environmental/Climate/Sustainability. The entries ranged from deeply personal and moving stories to exhaustively reported takes on serious issues to practical service pieces to content marketing explainers.

Six freelancers were selected multiple times. Longreads and The Washington Post had the most winners and honorable mentions.

Winners of the 2025 ASJA Awards for books will be named in September.

Entries were evaluated by 60 judges—a  round of applause for them, please—including Awards co-chair Rita Colorito and me. We found the articles and content writing works to be exceptional, and often had great difficulty choosing a single winner and honorable mention for a category. In fact, judges for the Food and Drink category felt two articles were so impressive they named both winners.

2025 ASJA Prize Money Article Winners

Four of the 2025 ASJA Awards for articles came with prize money — $500 for the Environmental/Climate/Sustainability winner, and $1,000 apiece for The Arlene (for an article that made a difference), the Donald Robinson Memorial Award for Investigative Journalism and the June Roth Memorial Award for Outstanding Medical Journalism.

Those winners and honorable mentions are:

Environmental/Climate/Sustainability

Winner: Alessandra Bergamin for “The Death Squads Hunting Environmental Defenders” in In These Times

Honorable Mention: Amy Brecount White for “Honeybees Aren’t the Pollinators We Should Be Most Worried About” in Arlington magazine

The Arlenes

Winner: Amy Halpern for “Does MCPS Deserve a Passing Grade?” in Bethesda magazine

Honorable Mention: Anna Medaris for “The Lure of Postpartum Luxury” in The Cut

Donald Robinson Memorial Award for Investigative Journalism

Winner: Sammy Sussman for “A Hidden Sexual Assault Scandal at the New York Philharmonic” in New York magazine

Honorable Mention: John Rosengren for “Inside the Tragic Life and Controversial Execution of Marcellus Williams” in Esquire

June Roth Memorial Award for Outstanding Medical Journalism

Winner: Esther Landhuis for “When Infection Sparks Obsession: PANDAS and PANS” in Undark

Honorable Mention: Amber Dance for “All About Cholesterol” in Knowable magazine

Other 2025 ASJA Awards Winners

The other 2025 ASJA Awards winners and honorable mentions:

B2B Content

Winner: Darcy Lewis for “Nebraska clinicians and scientists use team science to fight childhood brain cancer” in Nature Research Custom Media

Honorable Mention: Katie Cottingham for “Raman spectroscopy for edible oil analysis” in INFORM

B2C Content

Winner: Molly Petrilla for “The Art of Mothering” in the Pennsylvania Gazette

Honorable Mention: Darcy Lewis for “Housing as Health Care” in Curiosus, the magazine of Barnes-Jewish Hospital

Business Writing

Winner: John Hanc for “The Jitney at 50” in Newsday. (Read a Q&A with long-time ASJA member John Hanc here.)

Honorable Mention: Alexandra Talty for “The Hard Work of Bringing Kelp to Market” in Civil Eats

Excellence in Reporting

Winner: Steven Yoder for “New York Set Out to Keep Half of All Foster Youth With Family. Some Counties Still Fall Far Short of That Urgent Goal.” in The Imprint

Honorable Mention: Steven Yoder for “Math ends the education careers of thousands of community college students. A few schools are trying something new.” in The Hechinger Report

First-Person Essay

Winner: Will McGrath for “American Boys” in The Believer

Honorable Mention: Lane Scott Jones for “Creation of Woman: Evangelical and Transgender in the Bible Belt” in Longreads

Food and Drink

Winner: Kate Nelson for “’Hey, I Grew That’: The Native American School That’s Decolonizing Foodways” in The Guardian

Winner: Benjamin DuBow for “The Sabbath Stew” in Longreads

Health

Winner: Andrew Chapman for “Insatiable: A Life Without Eating” in Longreads

Honorable Mention: Jeff Oloizia for “Picturing an End to Alzheimer’s” in Madison magazine

How-To Service

Winner: Ruksana Hussain for “How to Behave When Visiting Sites of Remembrance” in Fodor’s.com

Honorable Mention: Jen Reeder for “Help Vets With PTSD Get Life-Saving Service Dogs” in Next Avenue

Lifestyle

Winner: Elizabeth Yuko for “Deck Chairs, Tuberculosis, and the Titanic: The Unexpected Origins of a Summertime Staple” in Dwell

Honorable Mention: Wendy Helfenbaum for “Wheels Up” in Next Avenue

Long-Form Content

Winner: Darcy Lewis for “PFF Registry 2024 Annual Report: Research, Impact, Community”

Honorable Mention: Emily Paulsen for “URAC Five-Year Specialty Pharmacy Report: Making a Difference with Measurement”

Opinion/Op-Eds

Winner: Nicole Carr for “The Black press democratized America” in The Emancipator

Honorable Mention: Derrick Z. Jackson for “The U.S. Supreme Court is Operating Like a Rogue EPA” in The Equation

Personal Platform

Winner: Gray Chapman for “Loaded” in Holding Patterns (a personal Substack)

Profiles

Winner: Simar Bajaj for “He was shot in the throat. Now he saves gun victims as a trauma surgeon in Baltimore” in The Guardian

Honorable Mention: Heather Johnson for ‘Variations of Healing” in Steinway & Sons Owners’ magazine

Reported Essay

Winner: Benton Graham for “I Used a Self-Driving Taxi for a Week. Things Got Weird.” in Slate

Honorable Mention: Abby Alten Schwartz for “For caregivers, a friend who ‘gets it’ can be a lifeline” in The Washington Post

Science

Winner: Amber Dance for “Investigating Crime Science” in Science News

Honorable Mention: Andrea Cooper for “Can Trauma Be Inherited Through Genes?” in NationalGeographic.com

Social Change

Winner: Mya Frazier for “The Eviction Experts” in Harper’s magazine with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project

Honorable Mention: Lillian Perlmutter for “Trick Clock” in The Baffler with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project

Technology

Winner: Amanda Ruggeri for “The surprising promise and profound perils of AIs that fake empathy” in New Scientist

Honorable Mention: Susan Shapiro for “I lost 15,000 friends in 5 seconds” in The Washington Post

Trade

Winner: Jennifer Larson for “The Political Temperature of Climate Change Education” in School Administrator

Honorable Mention: Amber Dance for “What Is a Cell Type?” in Nature

Travel

Winner: Robin Catalano for “How the forgotten tourist homes of the 1930s predicted Airbnb” in The Washington Post

Honorable Mention: Robin Catalano for “The Erie Canal: The manmade waterway that transformed the U.S.” in BBC.com

Wellness, Fitness & Sports

Winner: Maggie Slepian for “I Nearly Died Drowning. Here’s What It’s Like to Survive.” in Longreads

Honorable Mention: Anna Medaris for “The Newest Member of Your Local

The Newest Member of Your Local Run Club? Ozempic in Women’s Health

Richard Eisenberg is an ASJA board member, co-chair of the 2025 ASJA Awards and an “unretired” journalist who freelances about personal finances and co-hosts the “Friends Talk Money” podcast.