56th Annual Competition Fellowship Winners for 2021

Final Judges for the 56th Annual Competition:
Sandy Close – founder Ethnic Media Services, Pacific News Service and New America Media
Louis Freedberg – executive director, EdSource, and APF Fellow (’99)
Laura Parker – staff writer, National Geographic, and APF fellow (’96)

For Immediate Release. Contact: 202-246-3751

WASHINGTON, D.C. – With grants from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, nine journalists will purse topics in the coming year ranging from community anger over leaving coastal homes to a global snakebite epidemic that helps keep world’s “bottom billion” in poverty.

The foundation, which operates American journalism’s oldest writing fellowship, announced the winners of its annual competition today. The grants are designed to foster independent in-depth reporting on national and international affairs. The Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship program for journalists was established in 1965 in memory of Alicia Patterson who was editor and publisher of Newsday for nearly twenty-three years before her death in 1963.

The Fellows are awarded $40,000 for a 12-month grant and $20,000 for a six-month grant.

The new Fellows will spend their fellowship months traveling, researching, and writing articles on their projects for the APF REPORTER, a quarterly web magazine published by the Foundation. Every year, the Fellows’ articles and photo essays are distributed widely through newspapers, websites, news services and magazines worldwide.
The winning projects were selected through a highly competitive process of screening by two panels of judges. Applicants submitted detailed proposals, examples of past work, and references.

More than 415 reporters, editors, and photographers have won Alicia Patterson fellowships since the foundation was established.

The foundation’s directors named one Fellow in honor of Josephine Patterson Albright, who was a major benefactor of the foundation. The Josephine Patterson Albright fellow is science writer Joshua Sokol, of Raleigh, NC., who is examining the environmental status of the night sky and the industrialization of space.
This is the sixth year a fellow will be named for Cissy Patterson, who was Alicia Patterson’s aunt and editor of the Washington Times-Herald. The fellowship is given to a journalist pursuing a topic in science or on the environment. Dom Phillips, a freelance reporter for The Guardian in Brazil, is focusing on the urgent climate emergency in the Amazon, which is close to ceasing to produce enough rainfall to sustain itself.

For program information and applications for the 57th annual competition, contact:

Alicia Patterson Foundation,
1100 Vermont Ave. NW, Suite 900
Washington, DC 20005.

Phone: (202) 393-5995

Email: info@aliciapatterson.org.

Applications also may be downloaded at: www.aliciapatterson.org.
Apply online at: https://aliciapatterson.awardsplatform.com

Applications must be submitted by October 1, 2021.