for single published articles or series, broadcast media, multimedia, and film in media and journalism

2026: Bryce Covert, “Home Far from Home” (two-part series). The Nation. November/December 2025.

2025: Gretchen Purser, Writer & Director and Franklin Thompson, Director of Photography and Producer, Raise the Roof: Building Tenant Power in Syracuse. 53 mins. August Fifth, 2024.

2024: Madeline Ostrander, “After Oil.” The Nation, 14 Oct. 2023.

2022: Christine Walley and Chris Boebel for the digital humanities project ‘The Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project’.

2021: Joseph Sciorra, “Protesta Per Sacco & Vanzetti,” 2019.

2020: Alison Stine, “Last Days of the Appalachian Poverty Tour,” 2019.

2019: Rubén Vega and Irene Díaz Memorias Culturales de un Pasado Industrial / Cultural Memories of the Industrial Past, 2018.

2018: Lizzie Presser, “Below Deck,” 2017.

2017: Gabriel Thompson, “Dark Meat,” 2016.

2016: Christine Walley and Chris Boebel. Exit Zero (DVD), 2015.

2015: Michele Fazio and Jason Hutchens, Voices of the Lumbee (DVD), 2014.

2014: Monica Potts, “What’s Killing White Women?,” 2013.

2013: Tony Buba and Tom Dubensky, We Are Alive: The Fight to Save Braddock Hospital (DVD), 2012.

2012: J. Malcolm Garcia, “Smoke Signals: They Survived Iraq—and Died at Home,” “Smoke Screen,” and “Breathing In,” 2011.

2011: Chris Hedges (text), Joe Sacco (photography), “City of Ruins.” The Nation, 4 Nov. 2010.

2010: Michael Zweig, Trish Dalton, & Mike Konopacki, “Why are we in Afghanistan?,” 2009.

2008: Gabriel Thompson, “Meet the Wealth Gap,” The Nation, 11 June 2008.

2007: Pepi Leistyna, Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class (DVD), 2005.

for published books of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and other creative genres

2026: Fisher Lavell. Three Days Till Rapture.  Friesenpress, 2025

2025: Tim Hernandez. They Call You Back: A Lost History, a Search, a Memoir. U Arizona press, 2024.

2024: Nicole Chung. A Living Remedy. Harper Collins, 2023.

2022: Crystal Wilkinson. Perfect Black. UP of Kentucky, 2021.

2021: (tie) David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Winter Counts. Harper Collins, 2020; and Jim Daniels and M.L. Lieber, eds. RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music, Michigan State UP, 2020.

2020: Jodie Adams Kirshner, Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises, St. Martin’s Press, 2019.

2019: (tie) Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., Sacred Smokes U of New Mexico Press,

2018; and Jeanne Bryner and Cortney Davis, ed.s, Learning to Heal: Reflections on Nursing School in Poetry and Prose, Kent State UP, 2018.

2018: David Joy, The Weight of This World, Penguin, 2018.

2017: David LaBounty, Workers Write: Tales From the Construction Site

2016: Mike Yarrow and Ruth Yarrow. Photographs by Douglas Yarrow. Voices from the Appalachian Coalfields, Appalachian Writing Series/Bottom Dog Press, 2015.

2015: David LaBounty, Ed. Workers Write! More Tales From the Cubicle.

2014: Hakim Bellamy, Swear: Poems, West End Press, 2013.

2013: Paola Corso, The Laundress Catches Her Breath. Cavankerry Press, 2012.

2012: Mary Bucci Bush, Sweet Hope: a Novel, Guernica Editions, 2011.

2011: Jeanne Bryner, No Matter How Many Windows: Poems, Wind Publications, 2010.

2010: Jenifer Rae Vernon, Rock Candy, West End Press, 2009.

2008: John Marsh, You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929-41, U of Michigan Press, 2007.

2007: Poems by Jim Daniels and Photography by Charlee Brodsky, Street. Bottom Dog Press, 2005.

2026: Shankar Ramaswami,  Souls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant Workers in Contemporary India. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025.

2025: Patrick McKelvey, Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation, New York University press, 2024.

2024: (tie) Elena Shih, Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue. U of California P, 2023; and Mike Amezcua, Making Mexican Chicago: From Post-war Settlement to the Age of Gentrification. U of Chicago P, 2022.

2022: (tie) Heather Berg, Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism. U of North Carolina P, 2021; and Gabriel Winant, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America.Harvard UP, 2021.

2021: Sarah Attfield, Class on Screen: The Global Working Class in Contemporary Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

2020: Christopher R. Martin, No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class. Cornell UP, 2019.

2019: Sherry Lee Linkon, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring. U of Michigan P, 2018.

2018: David Roediger, Class, Race, and Marxism. Verso, 2017.

2018: Scott Henkel, Direct Democracy: Collective Power, the Swarm, and the Literatures of the Americas. UP of Mississippi, 2017.

2017: Angela Stuesse, Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South. U of California P, 2016.

2016: (tie) Ann Folino White, Plowed Under: Food Policy Protests and Performance in New Deal America.Indiana UP, 2014; and Julie M. Weise, Corazón de Dixie: Mexicans in the U.S. South Since 1910. U of North Carolina P, 2015.

2015: Linda Tirado, Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America. Putnam/Penguin Press, 2015.

2014: Christine Walley, Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago. U of Chicago P, 2013.

2013: J.T Way, The Mayan in the Mall: Globalization, Development, and the Making of Modern Guatemala. Duke UP, 2012.

2012: Franco Barchiesi, Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa. SUNY Press, 2011.

2012: Sean Burns, Archie Green: The Making of a Working-Class Hero. U of Illinois P, 2011.

2011: Jarod Roll, Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South. U of Illinois P, 2010.

2010: Steven K. Ashby and C.J. Hawking, Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement. U of Illinois P, 2009.

2009: David Bacon, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. Beacon Press, 2009.

2007: Nicholas de Genova, Working the Boundaries: Race, Space and ‘Illegality’ in Mexican Chicago. Duke UP, 2005.

for books by writer(s) of working-class origins that speak to issues of the working-class experience in academia

2026: Jess Pilgrim-Brown, Teresa Crew, and Éireann Attridge (eds), Working-Class People in UK Higher Education: Precarities, Perspectives and Progress. Emerald Publishing, 2025.

2025: Teresa Crew, The Intersections of a Working-Class Academic Identity: A Class Apart, an open-access book, Emerald press, Leads, 2024.

2024: Iona Burnell Reilly, editor, The Lives of Working Class Academics: Getting Ideas Above Your Station. Emerald press, 2022.

2022: (tie) Davarian L. Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities. Bold Type Books, 2021; and Michele Fazio, Christie Launius, and Tim Strangleman, eds., Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies. Routledge, 2021.

2021: Matt Brim, Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University. Duke UP, 2020.

2020: (tie) Jackie Goode, ed., Clever Girls: Autoethnographies of Class, Gender and Ethnicity Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; and Allison Hurst, Amplified Advantage: Going to a ‘Good College’ in an Era of Inequality. Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.

2019: Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims. Penguin, 2018.

2018: Diane Reay, Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes. Policy Press, 2017.

2026: David Flood, “Good Injuries: Embodiment, Temporality, and Collectivity in US Class Conflict.” Anthropological Quarterly, 98 no. 1, 2025.

2025: David Flood, “Fence Me In: Categorization, Whiteness, and Class Identity Politics in the United States,” Current Anthropology, vol. 65, no. 3, June 2024, University of Chicago Press.

2024 (tie): Nancy Caronia, “Refusing the Sentimental Italian Immigration Story in Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven,” Journal of Working-Class Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, December 2023; and Giorgos Gouzoulis, “What Do Indebted Employees Do? Financialisation and the Decline of Industrial Action,” Industrial Relations Journal, vol. 54, no. 1, January 2023, pp. 71-94.

2022: (tie) Gretchen Purser and Brian Hennigan, “Both Sides of the Paycheck: Recommending Thrift to the Poor in Job Readiness Programs.” Critical Sociology, vol. 47, no. 3, 2020, pp. 389-406; and Matt Nichter, “’Did Emmett Till Die in Vain? Organized Labor Says NO!’: The United Packinghouse Workers and Civil Rights Unionism in the Mid-1950.” Labor, vol. 18, no. 2. 2021, pp. 8–40.

2021: Katie Beswick, “Slaggy Mums: Class, Single Motherhood and Performing Endurance.” Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, vol 18, 2020, pp. 94-113.

2020: Pamela Fox, “Born to Run and Reckless: My Life as a Pretender,” in Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions. Routledge, 2019.

2019: Peter Cole, “Durban Dockers, Labor Internationalism, and Pan-Africanism,” in Choke Points Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain, Pluto Press, 2018.

2018: Liza Sapir Flood, “Instrument in Tow: Bringing Musical Skills to the Field.” Ethnomusicology, vol. 61, no. 3, 2017, pp. 486-505.

2017: Diana Garvin, “Singing Truth to Power: Melodic Resistance and Bodily Revolt in Italy’s Rice Fields,” Annali d’italianistica, vol. 34, 2016, pp. 373-400. Issue: Speaking Truth to Power from Medieval to Modern Italy.

2016: Geoff Bright, “‘The Lady is Not Returning!’: Educational Precarity and a Social Haunting in the UK Coalfields.” Ethnography and Education, vol. 11, no. 2, 2016, pp. 142-157.

2015: (tie) Patrick J. Finn, “Unrest In Grosvenor Square: Preparing for Power in Elite Boarding Schools, Working-Class Public Schools, and Socialist Sunday Schools” in Moving Critical Literacies Forward. Routledge, 2014; and Michelle M. Tokarczyk, “Toward an Imagined Solidarity in the Working-Class Epic: Chris Llewellyn’s Fragments from the Fire and Diane Gilliam Fisher’s Kettle Bottom.” Women’s Studies, vol. 32, no. 7, 2014, pp. 856-891.

2014: Gretchen Purser, ”La main d’oeuvre en liminalité / The Labour of Liminality,” Labour, Capital and Society, vol. 45, no. 1, 2012, pp. 10-35.

2013: Tim Libretti, “Working the Case: The Wire and Working-Class Cops on American Television,” in Blue-Collar Pop Culture. Bloomsbury, 2012.

2012: Stephen Brier, “Italian Militants and Migrants and the Language of Solidarity in the Early-Twentieth-Century Western Coalfields,” Labor, vol. 8, no. 2, 2011, pp. 89-121.

2011: Heath W. Carter, “Scab Ministers, Striking Saints: Christianity and Class Conflict in 1894 Chicago,” American Nineteenth Century History, vol. 11, no. 3, 2010, pp. 321-349.

2010: Elna C. Green, “Relief from Relief: The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike of 1937 and the Right to Welfare,” Journal of American History, vol. 95, no. 4, 2009, pp. 1012-1037.

2008: Alan Derickson, “‘Asleep and Awake at the Same Time’: Sleep Denial among Pullman Porters,” Labor, vol. 5, no. 3, 2008, pp. 13-44.

2026: Corrin Baker, A Carpenter’s Daughter: Working-Class Autoethnography. Georgetown University, 2025.

2025: Emily Coccia, “Workingwomen and Pleasured Reading: Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction and the Formation of Queer Readers,” University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2024.

2024: Brandi Lee Perri, “The Unseen Worker? Rethinking Who and What is Invisible in the Blue-Collar Workplace.” Sociology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2022.

2022: (tie) Kim McAloney, 2021, “Virtual Liberatory Women of Color Mentorship.” Education, Oregon State University, 2021; and Rhiannon Stevens, “Young People’s Access to Employment in Disadvantaged Communities in Wales.” Social Sciences, Cardiff University, 2021.

2021: Lindsay Bartkowski, “Figuring Women’s Work: The Cultural Production of Care and Labor in the Industrial U.S,” English, Temple University, 2020.

2021: Michelle Gaffey, “Subjects of Economy: Social Documentary Poetics and Contemporary Poetry of Work.” English, Duquense University, 2020.

2020: Melissa Meade, “In the Shadow of ‘King Coal’: Memory, Media, Identity, and Culture in the Post-Industrial Pennsylvania Anthracite Region.” Media & Communication, Temple University, 2019.

2019: Alexandrea J. Ravenelle “The New Entrepreneur: Worker Experiences in the Sharing Economy,” Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center, 2018.

2018: (tie) Steffan Blayney, “Health & Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work and the Working Body in Britain,” c. 1870-1939, University of Massachusets Amherst, 2017; and Simon Lee, “Working-Class Heroics: The Intersection of Class and Space in British Post-War Writing.” English, UC Riverside, 2017.

2017: Jackie Gabriel, “Manufacturing Precarity: A Case Study of the Grain Processing Corporation (GPC)/United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 86D Lockout in Muscatine, Iowa.” Sociology, Colorado State University, 2016.

2016: Gregory Rosenthal, “Hawaiians Who Left Hawaii: Work, Body, and Environment in the Pacific World, 1786-1876.“ Environmental history, Stonybrook, 2015.

2015: Jen Schradie, “This is (Not) What Democracy Looks Like: How Ideology, Hierarchy and Inequality Shape Digital Activism.” Sociology, UC Berkeley, 2014.

2014: No Award Given

2013: Sara Appel, “Football Wishes and Fashion Fair Dreams: Class and the Problem of Upward Mobility in Contemporary U.S. Literature and Culture.” Literature, Duke University, 2012.

2012: Jamie K. McCallum, “In Dubious Battle: A Case Study of the New Labor Transnationalism.” Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center, 2011.

2010: Tiffany Knight Raymond, “Labor, Performance, and Theatre: Strike Culture and the Emergence of Organized Labor in the 1930’s.” English, University of Southern California, 2009.

2009: Michele Fazio, “Between Mothers and Sons: Narrative Performances of American Identities in Italian American Literature.” English, State University at Stony Brook, 2008.

2007: Terry Easton, “Temporary Work, Contingent Lives: Race, Immigration, and Transformations of Atlanta’s Daily Work, Daily Pay.” English, Emory University, 2006.

for significant service and contribution to the field

2025: Sarah Attfield

2022: Barbara Jensen

2020: Janet Zandy

2019: Billy Bragg

2018: Paul Lauter

2017: Felice Yeskel

2016: Jack Metzgar and Frances “Fran” Benson

2014: Michael Zweig

2013: Sherry Linkon & John Russo, “Distinguished Service Award”