The Best American Newspaper Narratives, Volume 4

Book excerpt: This anthology collects the ten winners of the 2016 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, an event hosted by the Frank W. Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism at the University of North Texas. First place winner: Stephanie McCrummen, “An American Void” (The Washington Post), focused on the friends of the alleged murderer of nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, North Carolina. Second place: Christopher Goffard, “Fleeing Syria: The Choice” (Los Angeles Times), is about a former dressmaker from Syria gaining asylum in Sweden for her family, but her husband and children were still in Turkey. Third place: Sarah Schweitzer, “The Life and Times of Strider Wolf” (Boston Globe), documented the difficult life of a six-year-old boy and his brother, who were rescued from near-fatal abuse and sent to live with their grandparents in campgrounds in Maine. Runners-up include Cynthia Hubert, “Genny’s World” (Sacramento Bee); Michael M. Phillips, “Inside an FBI Hostage Crisis” (The Wall Street Journal); Mark Johnson, “Patient, Surgeon Work Together” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel); Howard Reich, “Norman Malone’s Quest” (Chicago Tribune); John Woodrow Cox, “Telling JJ” (The Washington Post); Maria Cramer, “The Boy Who Burned Inside” (Boston Globe); and Gina Barton, “Unsolved: A Murdered Teen, a 40-year Mystery” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).