Columbia Journalism School Announces the 2025 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Shortlists

Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University are pleased to announce the 2025 shortlists for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize. The Lukas Prizes, established in 1998, honor the best in American nonfiction book writing.

J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Awards (two winners each receive $25,000)

The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards are given annually to aid in the completion of significant works of nonfiction on American topics of political or social concern. These awards assist in closing the gap between the time and money an author has and the time and money that finishing a book requires.

Susie Cagle, The End of the West (Random House) 

Through text, illustration, archival research and field reporting, including interviews with more than 300 subjects, The End of the West tells the story of California at the vanguard of colonialism, capitalism and now climate change, through the stories of people and places intent on profound adaptation. 

Dan Xin Huang, Rutter: The Story of an American Underclass (Knopf)

In Rutter: The Story of an American Underclass, a deeply reported, polyphonic narrative, journalist Dan Xin Huang returns to his Appalachian hometown of Athens, Ohio, a community beset by segregation, to offer an exploration of class in America. He gives voice to people on all sides — across generations, political affinities and socioeconomic strata — of a heated, historic school integration debate. From the same publisher as J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, Rutter depicts the realities of those living at the deep end of our increasingly unequal, rigged system. 

Akemi Johnson, Better Americans: In Search of My Family’s Past in America’s Concentration Camps (One Signal)

Better Americans: In Search of My Family’s Past in America’s Concentration Camps tells the story of Tule Lake concentration camp, the maximum-security segregation center where the U.S. government incarcerated so-called disloyal Japanese Americans during World War II. On the barren northern edge of California, Tule Lake became a site of prisoner resistance, which culminated in more than 5,000 Japanese Americans renouncing their U.S. citizenship, the author’s grandfather among them. Blending history, memoir and reportage, this book explores these buried stories of resistance, the government’s attack on birthright citizenship and questions of nationality, belonging and intergenerational trauma and healing. Through in-depth archival research, interviews with survivors and descendants and pilgrimages to the incarceration site, Better Americans illuminates this vital piece of American history. 

J. Weston Phippen, We Want Them Alive: The True Story of a Massacre on the Border, and the Mothers Who Exposed a U.S. Deal that Trained the Killers (St. Martin’s Press)

We Want Them Alive: The True Story of a Massacre on the Border, and the Mothers Who Exposed a U.S. Deal that Trained the Killers follows a group of women in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, as they struggle to expose one of the largest massacres in Mexico’s recent history. In this case, it was not the cartels who killed their husbands and children but rather a group of U.S.-trained Mexican marines, a special forces unit developed to work alongside American agencies in the war on cartels. We Want Them Alive explores a side of this war that is rarely talked about, one in which the United States equips, provides intelligence to and trains foreign soldiers who go on to regularly commit grave human rights abuses, which are often dismissed by both governments as the cost of pacifying drug cartels. We Want Them Alive is a story of perseverance in the face of impunity, corruption and a misguided policy that has fueled a 19-year-long war, resulting in half a million dead or missing people, yet no fewer drugs crossing north over the border. 

Joe Sexton, Life or Death: Justice and Mercy in the Age of the School Shooter (Scribner)

Life or Death: Justice and Mercy in the Age of the School Shooter is the inside account of Nikolas Cruz’s longshot bid for mercy. Cruz killed 17 students, teachers and coaches at his former high school in Parkland, Florida. The story of his defense team’s ultimately successful effort to see Cruz spared execution is one of moral complexity, constitutional obligation, evolving brain science and old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. Life or Death explores issues of justice, vengeance and forgiveness. 

2025 J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award Judges: Erika Hayasaki (chair), Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and Matt Weiland

J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ($10,000)

The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize recognizes superb examples of nonfiction writing that exemplify the literary grace, commitment to serious research, and original reporting that characterized the distinguished work of the award’s namesake, J. Anthony Lukas. Books must be on a topic of American political or social concern published between January 1 and December 31, 2024.

Richard Beck, Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life (Crown)

For 20 years after 9/11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. In Homeland, Richard Beck delivers a gripping exploration of how the war fundamentally changed American life and explains why there is no going back. He isolates and investigates four key issues: the militarism that swept through American politics and culture; the racism and xenophobia that boiled over in much of the country; an economic crisis that connects the endurance of the war on terror to the end of the Second World War; and a lack of accountability that produced our “impunity culture.” To see American life through the lens of Homeland’s sweeping argument is to understand the roots of our current condition. In his startling analysis of how the war on terror hollowed out the very idea of citizenship in the United States, Beck gives the most compelling explanation yet offered for the ongoing disintegration of America’s social, political and cultural fabric. 

Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, a Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice (Penguin Random House)

In 1987, Ben Spencer, a 22-year-old Black man from Dallas, was convicted of murdering white businessman Jeffrey Young — a crime he didn’t commit. From the day of his arrest, Spencer insisted that it was “an awful mistake.” The Texas legal system didn’t see it that way. It allowed shoddy police work, paid witnesses and prosecutorial misconduct to convict Spencer of murder and ignored later efforts to correct this error. Award-winning journalist Barbara Bradley Hagerty spent years digging into America's broken legal system and immersing herself in Spencer’s case. She combed police files and court records, interviewed dozens of witnesses, and had extensive conversations with Spencer. In Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, a Conviction and the Fight to Redeem American Justice, she threads together two narratives: how an innocent Black man got caught up in and couldn’t escape a legal system that refused to admit its mistakes; and what Texas and other states are doing to address wrongful convictions to make the legal process more equitable for everyone. 

Mara Kardas-Nelson, We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance (Metropolitan)

In the mid-1970s, Muhammad Yunus, an American trained Bangladeshi economist, in an act widely recognized as the beginning of microfinance, lent $27 to 42 women, hoping small credit would help them pull themselves out of poverty. Soon, Yunus’s Grameen Bank was born, and the idea of giving very small, high-interest loans to poor people took off. There are mounting concerns that these small loans are as likely to bury poor people in debt as they are to pull them from poverty. Borrowers face consequences like jail time and forced land sales. Reportedly hundreds have committed suicide. We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance is about unintended consequences, blind optimism and the decades-long ramifications of seemingly small policy choices, all rooted in the stories of women borrowers in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Kardas-Nelson asks: What is missed with a single, financially focused solution to global inequity that ignores the real drivers of poverty? Who stands to benefit and, more importantly, who gets left behind? 

Rebecca Nagle, By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land (Harper)

By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land recounts the struggle for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma. Rebecca Nagle braids together the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days with a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native land rights more than a century later. Chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry exposes both the wrongs that the U.S. government has committed and the Native-led battle for justice that has shaped our nation. 

Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans, The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels (Crown)

The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels is an intimate, deeply moving investigation of an underreported phenomenon — the rising number of unclaimed dead in America today. Each year, up to 150,000 Americans go unclaimed by their relatives after death, leaving local governments to dispose of their bodies. In this extraordinary work of narrative nonfiction, eight years in the making, sociologists Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans uncover a hidden social world. They follow four individuals in Los Angeles, tracing the poignant, twisting paths that put each at risk of going unclaimed, and introducing us to the scene investigators, notification officers and crematorium workers who care for them when no one else will. The Unclaimed forces us to confront social ills, from the fracturing of families and the loneliness of cities to the toll of rising inequality. But it is also filled with unexpected moments of tenderness that reaffirm our shared humanity. Beautifully crafted and profoundly empathetic, The Unclaimed urges us to expand our circle of caring — in death and in life. 

2025 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Judges: Suzy Hansen (chair), Tyler Austin Harper, Héctor Tobar and Krithika Varagur

Mark Lynton History Prize ($10,000)

The Mark Lynton History Prize is awarded to the book-length work of narrative history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual distinction with felicity of expression. Books must have been published between January 1 and December 31, 2024.

Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House)

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America is “an essential American history” (The Wall Street Journal) that places the power of Native nations at its center. A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy and complex economies spread across North America. As historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans arrived, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well-armed. For centuries afterward, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests.  Even as control of the continent shifted toward the United States through the 19th century, Native Nations shows how the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant — and will continue far into the future. 

Justene Hill Edwards, Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank (W.W. Norton) 

In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman’s Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only nine years after it opened, their trust was betrayed and the Freedman’s Bank collapsed. Informed by new archival findings, historian Justene Hill Edwards unearths a major turning point in American history in this comprehensive account of the Freedman’s Bank and its depositors. She illuminates the hope with which the bank was first envisioned and demonstrates the significant setback that the sabotage of the bank caused in the fight for economic autonomy. Edwards argues for a new interpretation of its tragic failure: the bank’s white financiers drove the bank into the ground, not Fredrick Douglass, its final president, or its Black depositors and cashiers. A page-turning story, Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank is necessary reading for those seeking to understand the roots of racial economic inequality in America. 

Edda L. Fields-Black, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford University Press)

On the night of June 1, 1863, three federal gunboats steamed upriver from Beaufort, South Carolina, and destroyed seven plantations along the Combahee River, resulting in the liberation of more than 700 enslaved people. In COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid and Black Freedom During the Civil War, Edda L. Fields-Black argues that the raid was the largest slave rebellion in the continental United States. Fields-Black offers a full account of this pivotal event and the central role that Tubman played in it. Drawing on meticulous and original research, she recreates the world of the rice plantations and that of the enslaved laborers (including Fields-Black’s third-great grandfather). Destructive as it was, the raid was equally an act of creation, contributing to the formation of the community that thrives to this day in the Gullah Geechee Corridor. COMBEE is the authoritative work on the raid, its historical actors, and its long aftermath.

Seth Rockman, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (University of Chicago Press)

Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery is a rethinking of 19th-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor. In thinking of the industrializing North and the agricultural South, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. Using plantation goods — the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes and whips made in the North for use in the South — historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans — white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free — across an expanding nation. By following the stories of material objects, Rockman reveals a national economy organized by slavery — a slavery that outsourced the production of its supplies to the North, and a North that outsourced its slavery to the South. 

Michael Waters, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In December 1935, Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers the gripping stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany’s atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC’s nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender. Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking and inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports.  

2025 Mark Lynton History Prize Judges: Andrés Reséndez (chair), Keisha N. Blain, Scott Reynolds Nelson and Elizabeth Taylor