Latria Graham
THE AMERICAN MOSAIC JOURNALISM PRIZE 2025 AWARDEE
The American Mosaic Journalism Prize is awarded for excellence in long-form, narrative, or deep reporting on stories about underrepresented and/or misrepresented groups in the present American landscape.
The prize recognizes journalism’s critical ability to foster greater understanding, and aims to recognize and support freelance journalists with an unrestricted cash award of $100,000 per recipient. The prize is intended to call attention to the recipients’ great promise, and to give them the freedom to continue their work.
"Ms. Graham is a writer, storyteller, and cultural critic dedicated to covering under resourced and misrepresented communities in her home region of the American South. A fifth-generation farmer, she is from Spartanburg, South Carolina, and continues to live in the state.
Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Outside, Garden & Gun, and other outlets. Her forthcoming book, “Uneven Ground: A Memoir of a Family, a Land, and a Culture in Peril,” about her attempt to preserve her family’s century-old farm and sense of rootedness, will be published by Mariner, a division of HarperCollins.
Ms. Graham’s 2018 essay, “We’re Here. You Just Don’t See Us,” and its follow-up 2020 essay, “Out Here, No One Can Hear You Scream,” have been critically acclaimed, with the latter featured in both “Best American Travel Writing” and “Best American Science and Nature Writing.” Ms. Graham is a three-time Best American Sports Writing notable for her stories on athletes in places of tension—primarily Standing Rock, North Dakota, and Flint, Michigan.
Reflecting on the nature of freelance journalism and storytelling, Ms. Graham says: “Being a freelancer means holding the realities of risk and liberation close to my chest. I get to choose which stories are important to me and deserve detailed investigation. I’ve made a lifelong commitment to this type of storytelling because I have witnessed those around me lose everything, including people they loved, and there were two things that got them through: their faith—in their community and by extension humanity—and their ability to tell stories about what was. Understanding the past is key to understanding the type of future that can flourish when communities rebuild. Stories are how we survive. Is there anything more powerful than knowing that and contributing to the archives?”
PHOTO by Amanda Greene
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