The Best American Newspaper Narratives, Volume 11

This anthology collects the nine winners of the 2023 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest at UNT’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. First place winner: Jennifer Berry Hawes for “Captive No More: One SC Man’s Journey to Freedom after Years in Modern-Day Slavery,” about how a white restaurant manager held an intellectually disabled Black man in slavery-like conditions for almost six years (Post and Courier, Charleston, SC). Second place: Andrea Ball and Will Carless for “American Flashpoint: A Drag Show, a Protest and a Line of Guns” (USA Today). Third place: Thomas Curwen for “A World Gone Mad” (Los Angeles Times). Runners-up include Andrew Ford, “Blood and Money” (Arizona Republic); Dan Woike, “Darvin Ham Survived the Streets, a Stray Bullet and Intense Grief to Coach the Lakers” (Los Angeles Times); William Wan, “Is This What a Good Mother Looks Like?” (The Washington Post); Annie Gowen, “A Jan. 6 Pastor Divides His Tennessee Community with Increasingly Extremist Views” (The Washington Post); and Edgar Sandoval, “Uvalde Stories” (New York Times); and Lane DeGregory, “To End His Wife’s Suffering, He Shot Her. Was It Mercy or Murder?” (Tampa Bay Times).