Rachel Aviv

Rachel Aviv has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2013. She writes about a range of subjects including medical ethics, criminal justice, psychiatry, education, and homelessness. She received a 2021 National Magazine Award in Profile Writing for her piece on Elizabeth Loftus that appeared in The New Yorker. She was also a finalist for the 2018 National Magazine Award for Public Interest for “The Takeover,” a story about elderly people being stripped of their legal rights, and she won the 2015 Scripps Howard Award for “Your Son Is Deceased,” a story on police shootings in Albuquerque. Her writing on mental health was awarded a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship, an Erikson Institute Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and an American Psychoanalytic Association Award for Excellence in Journalism. She is also a recipient of a 2020 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. 

Rachel received a 2024 George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting for her piece “Alice Munro’s Passive Voice” published in The New Yorker. The Polk Award is one of the highest honors in journalism. She has also been named a finalist for the 2025 National Magazine Awards in the categories of Reporting and Feature Writing. Her first book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, was published by FSG in 2022 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The Value of Support

"When I received the Rona Jaffe Award, I was in the process of applying for PhD programs in clinical psychology. The award gave me the confidence and motivation to drop the applications and do what I actually wanted to do (and was scared I’d fail at), which was to write."