Sabine Heinlein, 2011 Award Winner
Sabine Heinlein explores the injustices and idiosyncrasies of American life through her immersion in the lives of those living on society’s fringes. Her first book, Among Murderers, published by the University of California Press in 2013, is a work of literary nonfiction about three men navigating their new freedom after several decades in prison. Among Murderers "provides an intimate sketch of a rarely seen demographic and reveals a pressing public policy issue,” Heinlein says. “More than 700,000 people are released from prisons each year, and these numbers are growing steadily."
Heinlein is also the author of the multimedia ebook The Orphan Zoo: The Rise and Fall of the Farm at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, for which she spent almost a year reporting at the notorious mental hospital in Queens, NY.
Heinlein graduated from New York University with a master's degree in journalism. She has been awarded a Yaddo residency and fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a residency at the MacDowell Colony. Her story “A Portrait of the Writer as a Rabbit,” published in The Iowa Review, received a Pushcart Prize.
Heinlein’s articles and essays have been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Psychology Today, Poets&Writers, Pacific Standard Magazine, Longreads and Die Zeit, among many other publications. She lives in New York with her husband and her menagerie.