Here are the winners of the Whiting Foundation’s 2025 Nonfiction Grant.

Today, the Whiting Foundation announced the ten winners of the 2025 Whiting Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress. Each winner will receive $40,000 to support the completion of their nonfiction project, and will also receive “strategic publicity guidance” from Press Shop PR. “Today’s authors need more than talent and funding,” said Constantia Constantinou, Executive Director of the Whiting Foundation, in a statement. “To thrive, they must be able to navigate an increasingly complex publishing and media ecosystem. This partnership will provide our remarkable grantees with the tools to be proactive, nimble, and strategic as they bring their vital stories and insights to readers.”

Here are the 2025 winners, along with information on their works-in-progress:

Paul Bogard
How to See the Sky: The Newest Science, the Oldest Questions, and Why They Matter for Life
Forthcoming from HarperOne (US)

Judges’ citation: Through the lens of recent advances in atmospheric science, meteorology, and satellite technology, Paul Bogard’s How to See the Sky reframes our understanding, just as Susan Casey’s The Underworld did for the ocean. Using this new “golden age of observation,” Bogard poetically transforms what we might once have considered an aerial emptiness into a vast ecosystem teeming with life and mystery. Grasping the sky as habitat is a leap for most of us, and Bogard helps us make it. He captures the wonder, significance, and precariousness of this historic moment.

The project: How to See the Sky showcases the sky in ways never before possible, teaches us the skills to interpret it for ourselves, and reveals how, through this process of rediscovery, we can better the world and deepen our personal experience. Brimming with fascinating science, history, culture, and religion, How to See the Sky inspires us to look up from our phones and reorient our lives.

Bio: Paul Bogard is the author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. His most recent works include Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World and the children’s book What if Night?. Paul is an associate professor of English at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he teaches environmental literature and writing.

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Jason Cherkis
The Attempters: The Science and Struggle of Suicidality
Forthcoming from Random House (US)

Judges’ citation: With bracing emotional clarity, intellectual depth, and stylistic precision, Jason Cherkis’s The Attempters explores a difficult subject which destroys families, corrodes society, and often defies treatment. He moves beyond personal and clinical perspectives to examine the broader ecosystem surrounding suicide, making this a foundational work, especially necessary as the scale of this problem grows apace. The book is a sensitive, humane, and propulsive exploration of suicide, which highlights both its urgency and complexity.

The project: Suicide and suicidal ideation is a subject we might be tempted to turn away from. In The Attempters, however, Jason Cherkis’s deep reporting on the history of suicide prevention and treatment of patients, alongside his close portrait of one deeply moving therapist-patient relationship, show that this difficult corner of mental illness is undeniably a part of the human experience. A work of rigorous, committed research and reporting, The Attempters provides an intimate look at therapists and their clients, as well as the researchers working to understand the suicidal impulse and how to stop it.

Bio:  Jason Cherkis is an investigative journalist based in Washington, D.C. He has reported extensively on crime, mental health, and poverty for decades. He began his career in the late ’90s as a staff writer at the Washington City Paper under David Carr, where he covered police brutality. In 2011, he became a full-time reporter for Huffington Post, covering national issues and managing the staff’s public records requests. His work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian, among others.

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S.C. Cornell
The Migrant and the Murderer: A True Story
Forthcoming from Penguin Press (US)

Judges’ citation: S.C. Cornell’s The Migrant and the Murderer uses a single, tragic event to explore the broader issues at the heart of American border politics. By focusing on the 2023 killing of Gabriel Cuen Buitimea and the trial of his accused killer George Alan Kelly, the book becomes a real-life narrative with the emotional weight and immediacy of a novel. Cornell manages to humanize the migrants risking all to cross the border, the ranchers who see themselves as defenders of the land, and the jurors trying to make sense of it all.

The project: An intimate, novelistic portrait of both migrants trying to enter the US and the Americans who are willing to kill to stop them, The Migrant and the Murderer tells the story of Gabriel Cuen Buitimea, who was killed while walking through George Alan Kelly’s Arizona ranch. The book explores Kelly’s 2024 murder trial, which ended in a hung jury. Peeling back the layers of the case, Cornell illuminates the historical and ongoing epidemics of vigilante and state-sponsored violence against immigrants on American soil.

Bio: S.C. Cornell is a writer and reporter based in Mexico City. Her reporting and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, The Drift, and LIBER: A Feminist Review. She grew up in Colorado and has lived in Nicaragua, Spain, and Brazil, among other places.

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Caitlin Dickerson
Deported: The Hidden Toll of American Expulsion
Forthcoming from Random House (US) and One World (UK)

Judges’ citation: How the US uses and abuses its immigrant labor force is one of the stories of our time, and Caitlin Dickerson is superbly qualified to deepen our appreciation of a complex and often convoluted issue. Deported is packed with intimate and telling details from a wide range of characters and sources. It offers a masterfully reported and humanizing perspective on a systemic issue, challenging national narratives by revealing how current policies weaponize and exploit immigrant labor while causing profound personal harm.

The project: Deported reveals an under-examined form of systemic inequality in American society. Deportation, and the threat of it, have upended the lives of millions of American children in the last few decades alone, while also creating a permanent underclass of workers who live in fear while their labor allows for the quiet lowering of costs for goods and services. Deported will shed light on hard truths as well as the multi-billion dollar industry surrounding deportation in order to create a long overdue shift in the national discourse over immigration.

Bio: Caitlin Dickerson is an investigative reporter and feature writer for The Atlantic. She won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for her Atlantic cover story about the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the US border. Prior to joining The Atlantic, Dickerson spent nearly five years as a reporter at The New York Times and five years as a producer and investigative reporter for NPR. She has reported on immigration, history, politics, and race in four continents and dozens of American cities. She has also been awarded a Peabody, Edward R Murrow, Livingston, and Silvers-Dudley Prize for her writing and reporting.

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Elena Dudum
They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful
Forthcoming from One Signal (US & Canada)

Judges’ citation: A deeply felt memoir of race and history that defies social erasures of the diasporic Palestinian experience, Elena Dudum’s They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful boldly explores how politicized identities, especially within the US, are shaped and manipulated by broader agendas. This is the best kind of memoir: a penetrating, eloquent account that weaves well-observed personal narrative with larger matters of global significance. It’s hard to imagine a topic more demanding of a thoughtful, disciplined approach, and Dudum meets the challenge.

The project: They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful is a memoir about the inheritance of exile, the burden of memory, and the slow, unrelenting work of returning to a place you’ve never been. Born to Palestinian-Syrian-American parents, Elena Dudum was raised on stories that felt more like warnings—her father’s voice always pressing against forgetting, always insisting they remember. She tried, for years, to escape that weight. But when she finally travels to Palestine—the land her grandparents fled in 1948—the emotional distance she built collapses. This book follows Dudum’s journey from silence to speech, from assimilation to self-recognition, as she navigates growing up in Zionist spaces, confronting institutional gaslighting in academia, and reconciling fear with pride. Told across four acts with interludes grounded in her father’s personal archive, the memoir becomes an act of survival—not just of memory, but of language and lineage. A record that insists: we were always here.

Bio: Elena Dudum is a Palestinian-Syrian writer and educator based in London. Her essays and cultural criticism—covering topics from Palestine to food, music, and diaspora—have appeared in The Atlantic, TIME Magazine, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Cosmopolitan, Autostraddle, and more. She has received support from Hedgebrook, Tin House, Sewanee, and The de Groot Foundation, where she was awarded the 2024 LANDO Grant. She earned her MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia University. Outside of writing, she develops recipes and hosts community yoga retreats, exploring how food and movement can create space for connection and care.

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Grace Elizabeth Hale
They Don’t Own Us: Harlan County, Kentucky and the Past and Future of American Workers
Forthcoming from Mariner (US)

Judges’ citation: They Don’t Own Us is a profound and layered consideration of how labor struggles in the 1960s and 1970s foreshadowed current American economic inequality, and Grace Elizabeth Hale is a writer and historian who captures grassroots labor’s fierceness and tenderness in equal measures. The book highlights how working-class Americans fought for better conditions and for their own vision of a more equitable future. Through immersive storytelling and meticulous research, Hale brings to life forgotten strategies of labor organizing and demonstrates their relevance today. This is a crucial work of history that revitalizes conversations around workers’ rights and will continue to instill its wisdom and inspiration in new generations of laborers fighting for dignity.

The project: They Don’t Own Us narrates what the fight against the economic, political, and cultural changes that scholars call neoliberalism looked like from the perspective of working-class Americans. In the late 1960s and 1970s, working people built a now mostly-forgotten interracial movement to reform unions and empower American workers. During Harlan County’s Brookside coal strike, local women, working and disabled miners, and United Mine Workers of America officials worked together to reinvent labor organizing and defeat Duke Power, a major power company. Brookside proved democratic reformers could run a union and use it to improve working-class lives. The strike also enabled the rank-and-file take-over of the UMWA to serve as the model for future union reform efforts, including those used by union workers in our present-day.

Bio: Grace Elizabeth Hale is the Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia. An expert on twentieth-century America, she is the author of In the Pines: A Lynching, a Lie, a Reckoning (Little, Brown, 2023), Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture (Ferris and Ferris, 2020), A Nation of Outsiders (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South (Vintage, 1999). She has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, and CNN.

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Will Harris
Need Is Need
Forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK)

Judges’ citation: Will Harris’s Need Is Need focuses on East London’s sheltered housing, offering a humanized perspective on systemic neglect. Through intimate storytelling, the book amplifies the voices of marginalized care residents, blending personal experience with socio-political analysis. Harris’s crystalline prose paints a thoughtful, multi-layered portrait of caregivers and those they serve. It’s a quiet, deeply felt account that immerses readers in the everyday struggles of the marginalized and overlooked. The narrative highlights the growing, unseen populations of lonely and neglected individuals, shedding light on a vital but often ignored aspect of public care.

The project: Need Is Need is a reckoning with the crisis in public care, told through a year the author spent working in East London’s extra-sheltered housing facilities during the pandemic’s aftermath. Through a daisy chain of intimate portraits—of residents, carers, the dying—it explores how race, class, and policy intersect in the daily lives of those abandoned by the state. Blending memoir, reportage, and historical inquiry, the book challenges the ideological boundaries between health and care, dependence and dignity, and asks what it would mean to truly value a life.

Bio: Will Harris is a poet and writer from London. He is the author of RENDANG (2020) and Brother Poem (2023), both published by Granta in the UK and Wesleyan in the United States. He won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, among other awards. He co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio (Poetry Translation Centre) with Delaina Haslam in 2022, and he co-facilitates the Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule. His work has been published in the London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Basket, New Republic, and Granta. He has held fellowships at the University of Manchester and Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas & Imagination.

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Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
Both and Neither
Forthcoming from Doubleday (US), Phoenix (UK), and Sonatine (France)

Judges’ citation: Powerfully and beautifully crafted, Both and Neither blends memoir and history with rare sensitivity, bringing to life trans experiences—past and present—with grace, intellect, and unflinching honesty. Alex Marzano-Lesnevich manages to combine ambitious research with deeply personal reflection, illuminating a history long obscured while reminding us that no one walks their path alone. A timely and profoundly moving work which feels especially urgent at this moment in our culture when anti-trans sentiment is surging.

The project: Both and Neither is a work of memoir and haunted nonfiction about life beyond the binary. Because genre and gender come from the same root, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich has chosen a trans-genre approach to write a transgender story. Through memoir, they ask how we see, or fail to see, ourselves and others. Alongside memoir, they utilize an archival thread to reinvestigate the stories of four historical figures, stories that were once invisible to them, deriving a transmasculine lineage from those who transcended gender in the same geographic places that Marzano-Lesnevich now inhabits. As the book progresses, Marzano-Lesnevich asks how to make a life in a culture that would deny, suppress, and harm trans people. To ask to be seen is to ask how to be loved is to ask how to live—answers to which can only be found in community, across time.

Bio: Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des lectrices de Elle, the Prix des libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD. It has been translated into 11 languages. Their essays appear in the 2020 and 2022 editions of Best American Essays as well as The New York Times, Harper’s, Agni, Yale Review, and other publications. A 2023 United States Artists fellow and three-time fellow at both MacDowell and Yaddo, they are the Rogers Communications Chair in Creative Nonfiction and an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

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Avi Steinberg
Grace Paley: A Life
Forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US)

Judges’ citation: Avi Steinberg’s Grace Paley situates the celebrated Jewish-American author within her literary and political context, spotlighting Paley’s roles in feminist activism, antiwar efforts, and anti-imperialist advocacy. This biography dissects the patriarchal and anti-Semitic currents influencing mid-20th-century literary culture, sifting through the past to harvest insights on the present. Steinberg effectively reintroduces Paley in vivid, engaging language, providing a close, relatable perspective on her life and times. His meticulous analysis of the social and cultural constraints on women and Jewish émigrés enriches our understanding of her world, making this a necessary work.

The project: Grace Paley: A Life is a biography of Grace Paley, a critical figure in mid- and late-century American and Jewish-American literature, in the women’s liberation movement, in radical Left politics, and in the intersections between these streams. “There’s a case to be made that Grace Paley was first and foremost an antinuclear, antiwar, antiracist feminist activist who managed, in her spare time, to become one of the truly original voices of American fiction in the twentieth century,” wrote New Yorker critic Alexandra Schwartz. Drawing on unpublished archival material, on new interviews, and on the latest scholarship, this biography is the broadest investigation to date of Paley’s life and work.

Bio: Avi Steinberg is the author of three books of creative nonfiction published by Knopf Doubleday: Running the Books (2010), The Lost Book of Mormon (2014), and The Happily Ever After (2020). His books have been translated into five languages and cited as Best of the Year by the SF Chronicle and New Yorker, as a “Notable Paperback” by the New York Times, and longlisted for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. He has been a features writer for the New York Times Magazine, and contributor to the New Yorker’s Culture Desk. His essays have appeared in the Guardian, Salon, The Paris Review, and n+1.

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Raksha Vasudevan
Empires Between Us: Estrangement and Kinship Across Three Continents
Forthcoming from Graywolf Press (US) and Knopf (Canada)

Judges’ citation: Raksha Vasudevan’s Empires Between Us presents a nuanced exploration of post-colonial aid work from the author’s South Asian Canadian perspective. Interrogating the complex politics of kinship and complicity, Vasudevan moves beyond simplistic narratives of Western saviors and Southern recipients. Her analysis provides a considered perspective on the moral ambiguities in cross-cultural aid, shaped by histories of colonialism in India, Africa, and Canada. Through personal recollections and keen cultural critique, she reveals how power structures influence her own life and work. The book is a compelling, authoritative guide to the intricate dynamics of modern global relations.

The project: Empires Between Us reckons with solidarity and its limits in a post-colonial age through interrogating the author’s experiences as a south Asian-Canadian aid worker in Africa. This book explores estrangement in many forms—across families, castes, and cultures—by examining the author’s relationships with other descendants of the colonized; researching the histories that entangle and divide them; and reporting on places degraded and (at least partially) defined by colonialism’s afterlife. Eventually, this peripatetic journey—between the lived and the researched; between Africa, Canada and India; and between the present and the historical—also surfaces unexpected types of kinship. Ultimately, Empires Between Us presents a vision of alternative intimacies spanning race, class, and borders.

Bio: Born in India and raised in Canada, Raksha Vasudevan is a writer and former aid worker. After a half-decade working in East and West Africa for various nonprofits and startups, she turned to journalism. Now based in Denver, she has reported on issues of race, environmental justice, housing, and “progress” for The New York Times, VICE, The Guardian, Outside, and High Country News, where she was also a contributing editor. Her essays and commentary on colonial legacy and family estrangement appear in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Guernica, and Hazlitt, among others. Her writing has received support from UCross, Mesa Refuge, Storyknife, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Writers’ Trust of Canada.