Best American Newspaper Narratives, Volume 12

This anthology collects the eight winners of the 2024 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest at UNT’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. The event is hosted by the Frank W. and Sue Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism at the University of North Texas. The conference launched the competition to honor exemplary narrative work and to encourage narrative nonfiction storytelling at newspapers across the United States.

First place winner: Bridget Grumet for “The Butterfly Effect,” a series examining both the problem of teen dating violence and the operation of the Texas prison system through the lens of three people whose lives were changed by the 2003 murder of a 15 year old (Austin American-Statesman).

Second place: Keri Blakinger for “The Dungeons & Dragons Players of Death Row,” a story of how some prisoners have dealt with the extreme isolation of Texas’s death row by developing their own version of the hugely popular fantasy game (New York Times).

Third place: Edgar Sandoval for “Two Children, a Burst of Gunfire and the Year That Came After,” a moving depiction of the ongoing recovery of two fourth graders seriously wounded in the Uvalde school massacre (New York Times).

Runners-up include Peter Jamison, “The Revolt of Christian Homeschoolers” (The Washington Post); Sydney Brownstone, “Lost Patients” (Seattle Times); Suzette Hackney, “American Contagion” (USA TODAY); Connor Sheets, “From a One-Way Flight to Sleeping in a Parking Lot” (Los Angeles Times); and Rick Jervis, “We Don’t Seem to Learn” (USA TODAY).

Gayle Reaves is editor-at-large for the Texas Observer and the former editor of the alternative newspaper Fort Worth Weekly. Previously she was a projects reporter and assistant city editor for the Dallas Morning News, where she was part of the team that won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. In 1990, along with two colleagues, she received the George Polk Award for courageous regional reporting.