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The Pulitzer Prize committee today released awards for the top U.S. journalism in 2022. Although no Oregon publications won, a longtime Portland resident, Eli Saslow, now a reporter at The New York Times, won the Pulitzer for feature writing for a series of stories he wrote for his former employer, The Washington Post.
The Pulitzer board commended Saslow for “evocative individual narratives about people struggling with the pandemic, homelessness, addiction and inequality that collectively form a sharply-observed portrait of contemporary America.”
Read his prize-winning stories here.
A Colorado native who graduated from Syracuse University, Saslow lives in Portland with his wife, the reporter Rachel Saslow, a frequent contributor to WW, and their children.
He previously won a Pulitzer in 2014 for explanatory reporting.
In the Post newsroom, Saslow’s former editor, David Finkel, lauded Saslow. “Eli is the hardest-working reporter I’ve been around,” said Finkel, a 2006 Pulitzer winner. “He is the best of who we strive to be.”
Saslow noted that his eldest child would take issue with that. Now that the middle schooler is old enough to read his stories, he said, she has determined “they are really long and actually kind of depressing.”
To conduct his reporting, Saslow immerses himself for long periods in the lives of the subjects of his stories. He paid tribute to their generosity.
“The main relationship that I have in my work—the relationship at the core of it—is always with the people I’m writing about,” he said. “We ask a ton of people to get to spend time with them.
“It takes a lot of courage to say yes to that. The courage and the burden is always on that side of the exchange.”