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The 2019 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Feature Writing
For distinguished feature writing giving prime consideration to quality of writing, originality and concision, using any available journalistic tool, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

Hannah Dreier of ProPublica

For a series of powerful, intimate narratives that followed Salvadoran immigrants on New York’s Long Island whose lives were shattered by a botched federal crackdown on the international criminal gang MS-13.

Hannah Dreier accepts the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing from Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. (Eileen Barroso/Columbia University)

Winning Work

Biography

Hannah Dreier is a reporter covering immigration.

Previously, Hannah served as the AP’s Venezuela correspondent for three years. She moved to Caracas amid a bloody nationwide protest movement and told the story of the country’s unraveling from hospitals, ports and food lines. Her Venezuela reporting won the Overseas Press Club Hal Boyle Award, a Gerald Loeb Award, and the James Foley Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism. Her 2016 “Venezuela Undone” series was recognized by the Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest and the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Hannah joined the AP in 2012 as a politics reporter in the Sacramento bureau and later covered the business of gambling from glitzy Las Vegas. Earlier, she was a metro reporter for the Bay Area News Group, which includes The Mercury News and East Bay Times. A graduate of Wesleyan University, she is fluent in Spanish and knows which casino games have lowest house edge.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Feature Writing in 2019:

Deanna Pan and Jennifer Berry Hawes of The Post and Courier, Charleston, S.C.

For a deeply moving examination of racial injustice in South Carolina that led to the execution of a 14-year-old black boy wrongfully convicted of killing two white girls, and that ultimately exonerated him seven decades after his death.

Elizabeth Bruenig of The Washington Post

For eloquent reflections on the exile of a teen sexual assault victim in the author’s Texas hometown, delving with moral authority into why the crime remained unpunished.

The Jury

Felecia D. Henderson(Chair)

Assistant Managing Editor/Features

Anne Fulenwider

Editor-in-Chief

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah*

essayist and freelance reporter, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Jeffrey Goldberg

Editor in Chief

Ann Marie Lipinski*

Curator, Nieman Foundation

Peter Maass

Senior Editor

Mary Schmich*

Metro Columnist

Winners in Feature Writing

2018

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, freelance reporter, GQ

For an unforgettable portrait of murderer Dylann Roof, using a unique and powerful mix of reportage, first-person reflection and analysis of the historical and cultural forces behind his killing of nine people inside Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C.
2017

C. J. Chivers

For showing, through an artful accumulation of fact and detail, that a Marine’s postwar descent into violence reflected neither the actions of a simple criminal nor a stereotypical case of PTSD.
2016

Kathryn Schulz

For an elegant scientific narrative of the rupturing of the Cascadia fault line, a masterwork of environmental reporting and writing.
2015

Diana Marcum

For her dispatches from California's Central Valley offering nuanced portraits of lives affected by the state's drought, bringing an original and empathic perspective to the story.
See All Feature Writing

2019 Prize Winners

See All 2019 Winners