Published in 2019
406 pages
Kaylen Ralph is an independent journalist and writer, a graduate of the journalism program at the University of Missouri, Columbia. In 2013, she co-founded The Riveter, a longform journalism magazine by women. Starting as a research assistant, Kaylen has been working on The Sager Group’s Women in Journalism series since 2013. Born and raised in Rockford, IL, she calls Chicago home.
Joanna Demkiewicz is a co-founder and editorial director of The Riveter, a women’s longform lifestyle magazine found both online and in print. She is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 2013. She is the publicist at Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit press in Minneapolis. She has written for Vox.com, OfNote.com, Women’seNews.org, and Femsplain.com.
What is this book about?
New Stories We Tell is the third in a series of women-centric journalism text/anthologies created to celebrate the great women of American longform writing. New Stories features stories by sixteen of the most talked-about contemporary magazine writers.
Each chapter features a landmark story, a bio, and an interview with the writer. We learn about lives, careers, writing philosophies, tricks of the trade, and backstories. Taken together, the assembled articles–republished from both legacy and new media–paint a picture of the shifting role of the genre known variously as longform, creative or literary nonfiction, and the New Journalism.
Writers include Rachel Aviv, Anne Babe, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Pamela Colloff, Sara Corbett, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Brooke Jarvis, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Sheelah Kolhatkar, Jaeah Lee, Lizzie Presser, Janet Reitman, Lisa Taddeo, Jia Tolentino, Amy Wallace, and Elizabeth Weil.
While journalists today, as always, are pledged to intellectual honesty and a true reporting of the facts, more than ever the genre is seen as an outlet for agency and a tool of social justice. Almost all of the women featured in New Stories We Tell aim their considerable journalistic talents at pressing issues of our day.
Maybe someday soon, books like this won’t be necessary. Written by women or not, these stories are simply great work.
