The New Yorker Festival | Reporting for Reform: When Words Change Lives

With Jennifer Gonnerman, Eyal Press, Sarah Stillman, Ben Taub, and Anthony C. Thompson. Moderated by Dorothy Wickenden.

Jennifer Gonnerman joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. Her 2004 book, “Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first piece for The New Yorker, “Before the Law,” about a teen-ager named Kalief Browder who spent three years imprisoned on Rikers Island without a trial, was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

Eyal Press is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and the author of two books of nonfiction, “Beautiful Souls,” which examines historical acts of moral courage and dissidence, and “Absolute Convictions,” a memoir of the abortion conflict. In 1997, he won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.

Sarah Stillman joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2012. “The Invisible Army,” her piece about labor abuses on United States military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, ran in the June 6, 2011, issue of the magazine, and received both the 2012 National Magazine Award for public interest and the 2012 Hillman Prize for magazine journalism. “The List,” her piece about the long-term repercussions for juveniles placed on public sex-offender registries, ran in the March 14, 2016, issue of the magazine.

Ben Taub writes for The New Yorker about jihadism in Europe and the war in Syria. His feature “The Assad Files,” which was published in the April 18, 2016, issue of the magazine, details a war-crimes investigation that links Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, to the systematic torture and murder of tens of thousands of people.

Anthony C. Thompson is a professor of clinical law at New York University School of Law, where he received the Podell Distinguished Teaching Award in 2007 and the Martin Luther King, Jr., Faculty Award in 2010. He served for nine years as a deputy public defender in Contra Costa County, California. His book “Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities: Reentry, Race, and Politics,” published in 2008, examines racial bias, public policy, and prisoner reëntry. His forthcoming book, “Dangerous Leaders,” explores the role of lawyers as leaders.

Dorothy Wickenden is the executive editor of The New Yorker and the host of the magazine’s Politics and More podcast. She is the author of “Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West.” Her next book is about the unusual collaboration among three abolitionist women before and during the Civil War.

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