The Atlantic Wins Top Honor at National Magazine Awards

Staff writer Tim Alberta won in Profile Writing for “Inside the Meltdown at CNN,” an in-depth profile of CNN’s former CEO Chris Licht. Alberta had been meeting with Licht throughout the course of his tenure, and for this story spoke with nearly 100 CNN staffers. The report was explosive and dominated news cycles.

In Reviews and Criticism, staff writer Sophie Gilbert won for three articles: “The Death of the Sex Scene,” “Porn Set Women Up From the Start,” and “Madonna Forever.” Gilbert was also a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, and is the author of the recent Atlantic Edition title On Womanhood: Bodies, Literature, Choice, which is a timely, probing essay collection of her writings exploring womanhood in pop culture.

Staff writer Jennifer Senior won in the Columns & Essays category for “The Ones We Sent Away,” which was the cover of the September 2023 issue. Senior unraveled the story of her aunt Adele, who was born in 1951 with various intellectual disabilities and was sent away to an institution when she was younger than 2 years old. Senior then explored the ways in which the improved care and facilities in the latter part of Adele’s life helped restore her humanity and identity––defying the expectations that were placed on her as a child.

Staff writer Jenisha Watts was a finalist for Feature Writing. In “Jenisha From Kentucky,” which was the cover of the October 2023 issue, Jenisha wrote with remarkable candor about growing up in a crack house, and how she survived it. Watts writes that she was always a “collector of words,” and found solace and escape in her deep love of books; she eventually found her way to the literary and journalistic world of New York, where she tried to hide her past. It is, as Goldberg said in an editor’s note, “one of the most heartbreaking, insightful, and emotionally resonant stories in recent memory.”

Nominated for Single-Topic Issue was “To Reconstruct the Nation,” from December 2023. The centerpiece of the issue, which was led by senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II, was a new feature-length play by the actor, playwright, and Atlantic contributing writer Anna Deavere Smith, which appears along with essays by writers, historians, and scholars including Secretary of the Smithsonian Lonnie G. Bunch III, Jordan Virtue, Peniel E. Joseph, Drew Gilpin Faust, and Eric Foner.