Justine van der Leun

Justine van der Leun is an independent journalist. As her Fellowship project, she wrote Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival. 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, New York Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, and The New Republic, among others. Van der Leun was also the host, lead reporter, and co-producer of the investigative podcast Believe Her.

Her journalism has been honored with the Mike Berger Award, the James Aronson Award, the Sigma Delta Chi Award, the Silver Gavel Award, the Gracie Award, and the Ambie Award for Excellence in Audio. 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, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Logan Nonfiction Program, Type Media Center, and PEN America. She lives in New York.

Selected Work

• “No Choice but to Do It”: Why Women Go to Prison: An article co-published by the New Republic and the Appeal, following one incarcerated woman’s story, and examining the connections between survival from gender-based violence and prison, including initial findings from an ongoing data project.
• Confinement and Contagion: A six-month deep dive into the distinct experiences of people in women’s prisons across the U.S. as the Covid-19 pandemic began to spread, for The New York Review of Books.
• The Evidence Against Her: An 18-month investigation into one case of criminalized survival in New York State, for GEN Magazine with Type Investigations.