Award and Honors

Awards, Honors and Notable Achievements (select)

2022: DC Theatre Arts Review, "Inside ‘The Box’: A Gripping View of Institutionalized Sadism"
2022: “Criminalizing Mental Illness,” won the Explanatory Journalism award from SPJ-Norcal (radio doc co-reported with Andrew Stelzer)
2020: My Op-Ed was selected as one of CNN’s “Op-eds that tell the story of the 2010s”
2018-2019: Stanford John S. Knight Fellow
2018: Performed LIVE on The Moth Podcast
2017: Artist-in-Residence at Ragdale
2016: A recipient of the GLIDE Memorial Church Community Hero Award
2016: Selected as one of 7x7 magazine’s HOT 20
2016: Writer-in-Residence at Blue Mountain Center
2015: My Daily Beast article, "Facebook Now a Place for Prisoners, Too," forced Facebook to chang its policy and stop removing prisoners’ Facebook pages upon a prison warden’s request. Facebook now has an independent process that investigates whether the incarcerated individual has violated its policy. NPR’s All Things Considered did a piece on this investigation. (co-authored with Dave Maas from the Electronic Frontier Foundation)
2015: “780 Days of Solitude,” selected for Best American Non-required Reading, published by Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt.
2013: Awarded Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant, for “brilliance and new ideas”
2009: 3rd-place winner for Transitions Abroad 2009 Narrative Travel Writing Contest, “Brave Eyes, Laughing Hearts: My First Encounter with Yemen.”

 Fellowships and Residencies

2020–current: Creative-in-Residence at The Battery in San Francisco
2018–2019: John S. Knight (JSK) Journalism Fellow at Stanford University
2017–2018: #LoveArmy Fellow at Dream Corps, where I worked with Van Jones and his team to write, edit, and host a podcast about divisiveness in America, Of Two Minds, produced by The Neda Nobari Foundation.
2017: Artist-in-Residence at Ragdale in Lake Forest, IL
2016: Writer-in-Residence at Blue Mountain Center in Blue Mountain Lake, NY
2014: Writer-in-Residence at Mesa Refuge Writing Retreat in Point Reyes Station, CA
2014–2016: As Visiting Scholar at University of California Berkeley I conducted an in-depth investigation into solitary confinement, visiting 13 prison facilities across the US and conducting over 75 interviews with incarcerated individuals in person or through intensive letter correspondences.

Drumroll...
The only (2) interviews I’ve ever done that have nothing to do with journalism, theater, Iran or incarceration:

Guest host on Slate’s Dear Prudence advice podcast
Self-Care Sundays, with Host Aditi Juneja, "in this conversation with Sarah Shourd, a noted activist, journalist, and playwright, we discuss how self-care can be indulgent and privileged, but how it can also be an opportunity to bolster community health that makes us all freer."