New America Announces National Fellows Class of 2022

Washington, D.C. — Today, New America announced its National Fellows class of 2022.

New America’s Fellows Program supports visionary researchers—journalists, scholars, public policy analysts, documentarians—who create powerful, exciting ideas that shape and influence conversations about the most pressing issues of our time. The full roster of 2022 National Fellows can be found here.

Since 1999, the Fellows Program has supported 250 National Fellows as they pursued ambitious projects resulting in the publication of 136 books, 12 feature-length films, and more than 15 longform articles. The work created by New America National Fellows has resulted in two Pulitzer Prizes, four Pulitzer Prize Finalists, one Emmy, two Emmy nominations, and 14 New York Times bestsellers. This class of fellows is comprised of 15 talented individuals who will pursue book, essay, and media projects in a wide range of policy areas, including the growth of militant groups in the United States, violence in Mexico, sex testing in sports, race and immigration, child care, and the housing crisis.

“I am honored to welcome this class of National Fellows to New America,” said CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter. “Each year, the New America Fellows Program selects a remarkable cross-section of writers, filmmakers, and content creators who are shaping the narrative of a new America. It is our privilege to support their important work, and help amplify their voices and new ideas. The Class of 2022 is an inspiring group of storytellers—all of whom are working on the kind of big, bold projects we need to identify past injustices, illuminate ongoing challenges, and shape our collective aspirations for a better future.”

“The work this class of fellows produces will encourage us to reflect on and deepen our understanding of critical and, at times, overlooked social issues,” Fellows Program Director Awista Ayub said. “We are thrilled to support these talented individuals as they seek to do their best work during this uniquely challenging time.”

After receiving nearly 400 applicants this year, the New America Fellows Program selected 15 talented individuals for our Class of 2022 National Fellows. Learn more about the applications we received to the program this year. Read our “Who Applied?: Class of 2022 National Fellows Program Applicants” report here.

New America’s Fellows Program thanks New America's board of directors, Emerson Collective, the Center for the Future of Arizona, the 11th Hour Project, Arizona State University's Center on the Future of War, and the Education Policy and Best Practice Lab programs at New America for their support this year.

The 2022 Class of New America National Fellows:

Azam Ahmed, Emerson Collective Fellow, is a reporter at the New York Times, and was formerly bureau chief in Afghanistan as well as Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Over five years living in Mexico and working across the region, he covered corruption and violence extensively, including investigative projects that received the Polk Award, the Michael Kelly Award, the James Foley Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism, and the Overseas Press Club Award. His final piece as bureau chief told the story of Miriam Rodriguez, who tracked down and helped imprison the members of a drug cartel that kidnapped and killed her daughter. Mrs. Rodriguez was then assassinated by the same cartel. The article will serve as a basis for the project, a non-fiction book that will examine violence and impunity in Mexico through the prism of Mrs. Rodriguez's story in an effort to answer a question that has perplexed experts for decades: What went so wrong in Mexico?

Keisha N. Blain, National Fellow, is an award-winning historian and writer. She completed a PhD in history from Princeton University and is now an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. She has written extensively on race, gender, and politics from national and global perspectives. Dr. Blain is currently an opinion columnist for MSNBC. Her writing has been featured in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Nation, Foreign Affairs, andmore. She is the author of the multi-prize-winning book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Her latest books are the #1 New York Times bestseller Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited with Ibram X. Kendi (Penguin Random House/One World, 2021) and Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America (Beacon Press, 2021). She is now writing a major new history of human rights framed by the ideas and activism of Black women in the United States from 1865 to the present. The book will be published by W.W. Norton.

Benoit Denizet-Lewis, National Fellow, is an associate professor at Emerson College and a longtime contributing writer with the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of three previous books, including America Anonymous and the New York Times bestselling Travels With Casey. Denizet-Lewis is at work on a new book (for William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins) about transformation and identity change. Tentatively titled We Don’t Know You Anymore, it will explore how and why people change their identities and belief systems, and it will confront contentious ideas about who is changeable—and who has the right to reinvention or redemption.

Rose Eveleth, National Fellow, is a writer and producer who explores how humans tangle with science and technology. She’s the creator of the podcast network Flash Forward Presents and host of Flash Forward and Advice For And From The Future. In her work, she’s covered everything from fake tumbleweed farms to million-dollar baccarat heists. Her project, TESTED, is an audio documentary series that explores the past, present and future of sex testing in sports and asks big questions about the lines we draw and the lengths we’ll go to enforce them.

Mike Giglio, ASU Future Security Fellow, is a journalist and writer focused on war, terrorism, and national security, as well as probing this divided American moment. He has reported from countries around the world and embedded extensively with local forces to cover the conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine. For this fellowship, he will be focused on the growing influence of U.S. militant groups while exploring the ways that America’s post-9/11 wars are fueling both this militancy and the country's wider civic breakdown.

Lauren Michele Jackson, National Fellow, is an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Northwestern University and contributing writer at the New Yorker. She is the author of White Negroes, which was short-listed for the 2020 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award. Her essays and criticism have also been published in New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, 4Columns, and elsewhere. She is an alum of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and received her PhD in English from the University of Chicago. She is currently working on Back: An American Tale, a collection of essays on American history’s belabored cores. Back is forthcoming from Amistad Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Myra Jones-Taylor, National Fellow, is an expert in early childhood and family economic security policy. A cultural anthropologist and ethnographer by training, she has devoted her career to advancing public policies that empower women and families and ensure children and communities have what they need to thrive. She was Connecticut's founding commissioner of early childhood, where she created the nation's most comprehensive cabinet-level state agency focused on young children and their families. She is currently the chief policy officer at ZERO TO THREE, where she oversees a federal and state strategy to increase public investment in infants, toddlers, and their families, including through the first of its kind State of Babies Yearbook and the Think Babies campaign. Named a Care 100 Warrior and one of the most influential people in care, Jones-Taylor is a national leader in the movement to redefine care and the role of the care economy in everyday life. She is working on a book that draws from personal and professional experiences to call attention to the ways gendered and racial inequities in child care policy have contributed to the current child care crisis.

Sarah Kay, New Arizona Fellow, is a writer, performer, and educator from New York City. She is the founder and co-director of Project VOICE, an organization that uses poetry to entertain, educate, and empower students and educators in classrooms and communities worldwide. Kay is the author of four books of poetry: B, No Matter the Wreckage, The Type, and All Our Wild Wonder. Kay has been a Hedgebrook Writer in Residence, a Serenbe Artist in Residence, and a Kundiman Fellow. She is currently researching and writing about her Japanese American grandmother's experience in South Dakota at the end of World War II.

Abrahm Lustgarten, Emerson Collective Fellow, is a senior reporter at ProPublica, where he has written about the environment and climate change since 2008, and a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine. He is working on a book about how climate change will force a great global migration and a demographic reorganization of the United States for Farrar Straus & Giroux. Lustgarten was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his 2015 work about water scarcity and the Colorado River. He won a George Polk Award, the Overseas Press Club's Whitman Bassow Award, and the National Academies of Sciences' communication award, among others, for his reporting on the environment.

Francesca Mari, National Fellow, has written features about housing, conmen, and abuses of power for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, and others. From 2012 to 2016, she was a writer and editor at Texas Monthly, and from 2016 to 2018, she was a senior editor at the California Sunday Magazine. She now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches narrative nonfiction in the Literary Arts Department at Brown University and recently earned her real estate license. She is writing a book about why housing is so expensive, charting the consequences of financialization on the lives of neighbors on a single block in Los Angeles.

Julian Brave NoiseCat, 11th Hour Fellow, is vice president of policy and strategy for Data for Progress and a fellow of the Type Media Center. A columnist for Canada’s National Observer and contributing editor with Canadian Geographic, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and other publications. NoiseCat's work has been recognized by the judges of the Livingston Awards, Mirror Awards, Canadian Digital Publishing Awards, and Canadian National Magazine Awards, among others. In 2021, he was named to the TIME100 Next list of emerging leaders alongside the starting point guard of his fantasy basketball team, Luka Doncic. His debut nonfiction book, We Survived the Night, which braids together reportage on Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada with personal narrative, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in North America, Profile Books in the United Kingdom, Albin Michel in France, and Aufbau Verlag in Germany.

Janet Reitman, ASU Future Security Fellow, is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, covering extremism, youth, and national security. She is currently at work on a book for Random House about the demoralization of post-9/11 America. Tentatively titled The Unraveling of Everything, the book presents a narrative history of the country's increasingly violent and extremist drift from the 1990s to the current day. A former contributing editor at Rolling Stone, Reitman has twice been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, and her work has appeared in GQ, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Men's Journal, and many other publications, as well as anthologized in the Best American Magazine Writing series (2007 and 2014). Reitman's first book, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion (2011), was a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book.

Anna Louie Sussman, National Fellow, is a freelance journalist based in New York. A former staff reporter at Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, she now writes about gender, economics, and reproduction for publications including the New Yorker and the New York Times. She is currently at work on a book, Inconceivable: Reproduction in an Age of Uncertainty, about the barriers people face in starting or growing their families, for Dey Street Books.

Justine van der Leun, Emerson Collective Fellow, is an independent journalist and a fellow at Type Media Center. Since 2018, she has been reporting exclusively on the ways in which victims of gender-based violence are punished by the criminal legal system. She is writing Unreasonable Women: Survival, Punishment, and Mass Incarceration in America, which will blend narrative stories with original nationwide data and research to explore the links between trauma, systemic failures, and the criminalization of women’s acts of survival from physical and sexual abuse. The book will be published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins. She is also the host and lead reporter of the investigative podcast Believe Her, produced by Lemonada Media and Spiegel & Grau. Van der Leun’s prior books include, most recently, We Are Not Such Things, and her features have been published in the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, the Guardian, VQR, and the New Republic, among others. Her journalism has won or been a finalist for the Mike Berger Award, the James Aronson Award, the Sigma Delta Chi Award, and the Silver Gavel Award. Van der Leun has received grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, Type Investigations, the International Women’s Media Foundation, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, The Justice Collaborative, and PEN America.

Ellen D. Wu, National Fellow, researches, teaches, and writes about race and immigration in United States history. She is an associate professor of history at Indiana University Bloomington and the author of the award-winning book The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (2014). Wu’s scholarship has been supported with fellowships from the Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Historical Studies, and the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. Her work has been featured in a variety of academic and public-facing platforms, including Modern American History, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, NPR’s Code Switch, Goop, Adam Ruins Everything, and the PBS documentary series Asian Americans. She is currently writing Overrepresented: The Surprising History of Asian Americans and Racial Justice, a new story about diversity, data, and democracy in the United States forthcoming from Princeton University Press.