UNT Press

About Reaves's Best American Newspaper Narratives Volume 13

This anthology collects the eight winners of the 2025 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest at UNT’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. The event is hosted by the Frank W. and Sue Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism at the University of North Texas. The conference launched the competition to honor exemplary narrative work and to encourage narrative nonfiction storytelling at newspapers across the United States.

First place winner: Tom Hallman Jr. and Douglas Perry for “The Last Thing They Wanted,” which makes eloquent use of interviews and the subjects’ own letters to reconstruct the life and double-suicide death of a beloved and richly accomplished couple in a small town (The Oregonian).

Second place: John Woodrow Cox for “Guilty: Inside the High-Risk, Historic Prosecution of a School Shooter’s Parents,” a rare, behind-the-scenes account of the unprecedented prosecution of parents whose son killed four students (The Washington Post). Third place: Christopher Spata and Dan Sullivan for “The Marked Man,” which exposes the flaws of forensic evidence on a man who spent thirty-seven years on death row before he was exonerated (Tampa Bay Times).

Runners-up include Gina Barton, “Untested” (USA TODAY); Daniel Beekman, “Two WA Men Were Arrested in Mental Health Crises. Only One Survived” (The Seattle Times); Sabra Ayres and Laura King, “In War-Torn Ukraine, a Woman Searches for Her Husband. Will She Find Him?” (Los Angeles Times); Lane DeGregory, “The Housing Experiment” (Tampa Bay Times); and Steve Fisher, “How a Mennonite Farmer Became a Drug Suspect” (Los Angeles Times).