Brooke Jarvis will focus on membership disputes within Native American tribes and the complicated questions about sovereignty and identity that they raise.
New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute has named Brooke Jarvis, a contributing writer to the California Sunday Magazine, as the recipient of its 2016 Reporting Award.
The award supports a work of journalism in any medium on significant underreported subjects in the public interest.
Jarvis will focus on membership disputes within Native American tribes and the complicated questions about sovereignty and identity that they raise.
Stephen D. Solomon, associate director of the Institute, notes that the need for the award remains as strong today as it was in 2009, when it was established to encourage enterprise journalism during a time of extensive budget and personnel cuts throughout the journalism industry.
“The Reporting Award has supported great journalism over the years,” said Solomon, “and Brooke’s project promises the same, delving deeply into significant issues in the Native American community.”
Jarvis has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Pacific Standard, Audubon, MATTER, and Seattle Met Magazine, among others. Her story “Homeward,” which appeared in the California Sunday Magazine, centered on the leaders of a small village in the Ecuadorian Amazon sending their children away in the face of oil development and colonization; it was named a 2016 finalist for the Livingston Award in International Reporting. Her story “The Deepest Dig,” about the world’s first deep-sea mine, in Papua New Guinea, was included in The Best American Science and Nature Writing (Houghton-Mifflin, 2015).
Jarvis’ “When We Are Called to Part,” about the final days of a leprosy settlement in Hawaii, is anthologized in the forthcoming Love and Ruin (Norton, 2016) while “Collapse,” a story in Seattle Met Magazine about a deadly landslide in Washington State, won first place for general magazine reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists, northwest chapter.
Jarvis will receive a stipend of $2,500 upon her selection as the competition winner and an additional $7,500 upon successful completion of the work. As a visiting scholar at NYU, she will have use of the Institute’s facilities as well as NYU’s libraries and other scholarly resources. The completed article is expected to be published in a major media outlet, either alone or in conjunction with the Institute.
Sarah Stillman, the inaugural recipient of the Reporting Award, traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan to report on the abuse of third-world service workers on U.S. military bases there. Her piece, “The Invisible Army,” which appeared in the June 6, 2011, issue of the New Yorker, won several of journalism’s top prizes in 2012: the National Magazine Award in the category of “Public Interest”; the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism; the Overseas Press Club’s Joe and Laurie Dine Award for International Human Rights Reporting; and the Michael Kelly Award for the “fearless pursuit and expression of truth.”
For more on the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, go to http://journalism.nyu.edu/; for more on the Reporting Award, go to: http://journalism.nyu.edu/thereportingaward/.
Applications for next year’s award will be accepted in January 2017.