Award Finalists
Every year, we struggle with the final decision about who should receive the Margolis Award because there are so many promising writers who merit recognition.
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2025 Finalists
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Laura Preston (winner)
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Yassmin Abdel-Magied - a Sudanese diaspora writer and advocate. The creator of eyesonsudan.net, adviser on the sudandigitalarchive.com and author of the essay collection Talking About a Revolution, Yassmin is dedicated to the civilian movement in Sudan and the celebration and amplification of Sudanese culture.
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​Abdelrahman ElGendy - an author and literary translator from Cairo. His book, HUNA: A Memoir of Imprisonment, Survival, and Becoming in Post-revolution Egypt, is forthcoming from Hogarth / Penguin Random House in 2026. A winner of the Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award, ElGendy examines empire, exile, and state violence, attending to the entanglements of local and global oppression and the solidarities that emerge across them.
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Mary Fontana - a writer working to support migrant hospitality and immigration justice for over two decades. She is the author of Strangers in the Province of Joy: Practicing Radical Hospitality on the US-Mexico Border, a narrative history of migration across the southern border over the last half-century.
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​Gabb Schivone - a journalist writing a book about ordinary Americans crushed by poverty, homelessness, and sex work while pursuing the elusive American Dream. Gabb is a 2025 ChangeWire fellow at Community Change and a 2024 alumnus of PEN America's Emerging Voices fellowship in nonfiction.
2024 Finalists
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Wilbert L. Cooper (winner)
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Mark Chiusano - author of The Fabulist, a biography of George Santos, and the story collection Marine Park, a PEN/Hemingway honorable mention.
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2023 Finalists
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Jordan Michael Smith (winner)
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Abdelrahman ElGendy - an Egyptian writer, human rights activist, and six-year political prisoner who is writing a memoir, Wings: Six Years a Political Prisoner in Egypt.
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Lauren Sandler - A writer whose immersive journalism explores America’s social crises. Sandler’s fourth book, American Prophecy: One Family, Two Nations, and a World on Fire, will attempt to understand our current and catastrophic division through the lens of a family seeded in the loss of one civil war and now on opposing sides of the current one.
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Caroline Eaton Tracy - A writer focusing on the Southwestern U.S., Mexico and their borderlands. Tracey is completing Overburden: Making a Postmortem Infrastructure in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, a book about the diverse individuals and agencies who have developed a complex, transnational system to bring he remains of migrants who died crossing to the U.S. home to grieving families.​
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2022 Finalists
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Mara Kardas-Nelson (winner)
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May Sori Jeong - May Jeong is an award-winning journalist currently writing about sex work and how it intersects with the American criminal justice system.
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Emily Raboteau - Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, and parenthood. She is the author of Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.
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Claudia Rowe - Claudia Rowe is the winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award. She has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Mother Jones, A&E Biography and The Stranger.
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Jordan Michael Smith - Jordan Michael Smith's journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atavist, BBC.com, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The Progressive, MSNBC.com, The Guardian, and many other publications. He has been a finalist for PEN America’s Writing For Justice Fellowship and short-listed for the MIT Technology Review COVID Inequality Fellowship.
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2021 Finalists
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Wes Enzinna (winner)
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Abdelrahman ElGendy - Abdelrahman ElGendy is a former Egyptian political prisoner for over six years. He currently writes for multiple platforms, exploring ways of resistance through counter-narratives, mainly through documenting his prison experience and raising awareness about prisoners of conscience.
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Sheena Daree Miller - Sheena Daree Miller's work relies on comedy and satire both as a means for coping and as a tool for raising awareness around societal ills; her current project explores the unique and interrelated struggles and victories facing far-flung communities of the global African Diaspora, from Turkey to Germany to Ecuador and beyond.
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Kenneth R. Rosen - Kenneth R. Rosen, writer, journalist and author, is a contributing writer to WIRED and a frequent contributor to The New York Times and The Washington Post.. He is the author of Troubled: The Failed Promise of America's Behavioral Treatment Programs (Little A, 2021), which The New York Times Book Review called "a searing exposé" and a "public service."
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Susan Bruns Rowe - Susan Bruns Rowe's essays and interviews have appeared in The Sun,Lithub, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, The American Oxonian, and elsewhere. She has published fiction and poetry in The Louisville Review, The Clackamas Literary Review, and Penny: the Illustrated Zine of Flash Prose.

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Jordan Michael Smith - Jordan Michael Smith's journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atavist, BBC.com, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The Progressive, MSNBC.com, The Guardian, and many other publications. He has been a finalist for PEN America’s Writing For Justice Fellowship and short-listed for the MIT Technology Review COVID Inequality Fellowship.