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The 2025 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Feature Writing

Finalist: Joe Sexton, contributor, The Marshall Project

For his exclusive inside account of a legal team’s efforts to spare the Parkland high school shooter from the death penalty, a saga of moral complexity, constitutional law and shattering trauma for those involved.

Nominated Work

September 17, 2024
The Hardest Case for Mercy

Biography

Joe Sexton spent 25 years as a reporter and senior editor at the New York Times, and another eight years as a reporter and senior editor at ProPublica, the non-profit investigative news organization. He directed or assisted in six projects awarded Pulitzer Prizes, for breaking news, investigative reporting, feature writing, national and explanatory reporting. Projects he oversaw also won three Emmys. A story he directed, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting and was the inspiration for the award-winning Netflix series, “Unbelievable,” starring Toni Collette and Kaitlyn Dever. His work was anthologized in The Best American Sportswriting, Houghton Mifflin, 1992. In 2021, he was awarded Columbia University’s Meyer Berger Award for distinguished human interest storytelling. “Snow Fall,” a story written by John Branch and edited by Sexton, won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and is considered a landmark achievement in digital storytelling. In 2022, a story for the New Yorker magazine he reported and edited won a George Polk award and an Overseas Press Club award for international reporting on human rights. His book, The Lost Sons of Omaha, was published by Scribner in 2023, and was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. He is at work on a true crime documentary film with HBO. Sexton is the father of four girls, and is married to Beth Flynn, the deputy director of photography at the New York Times.
 

Winners

Prize Winner in Feature Writing in 2025:

Mark Warren, contributor, Esquire

For a sensitive portrait of a Baptist pastor and small town mayor who died by suicide after his secret digital life was exposed by a right-wing news site. Feature Writing

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Feature Writing in 2025:

Anand Gopal, contributing writer, The New Yorker

For a deeply reported narrative of a woman’s life before and after she is imprisoned at an isolated detention camp in eastern Syria, illustrating how love and family intersect with larger geopolitical concerns.

The Jury

Madhulika Sikka(Chair)

Vice President and Executive Editor, Crown Publishing

Molly Ball

Bill Grueskin

Professor of Professional Practice in the Faculty of Journalism, Columbia University

Erika Hayasaki

Associate Professor of Literary Journalism, University of California, Irvine

Julie Makinen

Board Chair, California News Publishers Association; Former Editor-in-Chief, The San Francisco Standard

Mark S. Morrow

Editor at Large, The Boston Globe

Matt Purdy

Editor at Large, The New York Times

Winners in Feature Writing

2023

Eli Saslow of The Washington Post

For evocative individual narratives about people struggling with the pandemic, homelessness, addiction and inequality that collectively form a sharply-observed portrait of contemporary America.
2022

Jennifer Senior of The Atlantic

For an unflinching portrait of a family’s reckoning with loss in the 20 years since 9/11, masterfully braiding the author's personal connection to the story with sensitive reporting that reveals the long reach of grief.
See All Feature Writing

2025 Prize Winners

National Reporting

Staff of The Wall Street Journal

For chronicling political and personal shifts of the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, including his turn to conservative politics, his use of legal and illegal drugs and his private conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
See All 2025 Winners