The Best American Newspaper Narratives, Volume 11

Book excerpt: 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); 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).