SARAH SHOURD
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  • End of Isolation Tour
  • Trauma-Informed Journalism
    • Books & Podcast
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  • Advocacy and Media Coverage
    • Award and Honors
    • Production Experience
  • Contact
    • Consulting, Speaking and Workshops

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. 
                         Podcast Appearances:
  • This Restorative Justice Life, #114. Does Restorative Justice "Let Killers Walk Free"? 
  • Project Write Now, "The Key to Resilience, with Robert Pollock. 
  • Onstage Offstage Podcast, #161: Sarah Shourd, Playwright, trauma-informed journalist
  • ​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."​



  • Home
    • My Imprisonment
  • End of Isolation Tour
  • Trauma-Informed Journalism
    • Books & Podcast
    • BLOG - In Real Time
  • Advocacy and Media Coverage
    • Award and Honors
    • Production Experience
  • Contact
    • Consulting, Speaking and Workshops