The Washington Monthly Announces Finalists for 2026 Kukula Award Book Review Prize

The Washington Monthly proudly announces the finalists for the 2026 Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing—the only journalism prize dedicated to highlighting and encouraging reviews of serious, public affairs-focused books. Now in its seventh year, the award honors the memory of Kukula Kapoor Glastris, the magazine’s longtime and beloved books editor. Two prize winners will be announced on Monday, June 15.

Selected from nearly 80 outstanding submissions published in 2025 across a range of print and digital media outlets, the finalists were honored for their clear and artful exposition, original and persuasive thesis, and ability to enlighten readers with new and valuable information. This year’s judges—veteran journalists, authors, and reviewers themselves—gave priority to works of public affairs and policy, politics, history, and biography, themes central to the Washington Monthly’s mission and tradition.

Finalists were chosen in two categories based on publication size. In the larger category, our finalists are:

Jacob Bacharach in The New Republic, for his review of Enshittification, by Cory Doctorow Rhoda Feng in The New Republic, for her review of I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, by Hu Anyan Julia M. Klein in The Atlantic, for her review of A Flower Traveled in My Blood, by Haley Cohen Gilliland Laura Miller in Slate, for her review of Not My Type, by E. Jean Carroll Katy Waldman in The New Yorker, for her review of three books on modern-day feminism by Kate Mason, Laura Brown, and Kristina O’Neill, and Steph Wagner

Among smaller publications, this year’s finalists are:

Diya Isha in The Swaddle, for her review of Mother Mary Comes to Me, by Arundhati Roy Michael J. Kramer in Society for U.S. Intellectual History Book Review, for his review of two essay collections on social criticism and history by Adam Shatz and George Scialabba Dan Piepenbring in Harper’s magazine, for his review of three new books with interwoven themes by Cory Doctorow, Ken Wilson, and Adrienne Mayor Paul Schofield in Jacobin magazine, for his review of The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, by Matt McManus Ed Simon in The Los Angeles Review of Books, for his review of Believe, by Ross Douthat

“Nonfiction book reviewing plays a key role in transmitting hard-won reporting, research, and ideas on major issues of the day to policy makers and citizens who can’t possibly read more than a fraction of the important books published each year,” said Washington Monthly Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris, Kukula’s husband of 31 years. This year’s finalists illuminate many such issues—from gender and identity politics to the ongoing impact of the Trump presidency on fundamental questions of truth and lies; from the perils of the gig economy to the way “enshittification” captures the zeitgeist of our fraught relationship with technology; and from political censorship in China today to a reckoning with state-sponsored political terror of Argentina’s past.

The Washington Monthly congratulates these talented book reviewers and their publications for their commitment to the important craft of serious book reviewing.

ABOUT OUR JUDGES

Six judges selected this year’s finalists and winners, generously donating their time and invaluable guidance. They are:

Sara Bhatia is a historian and an independent museum consultant. A frequent book reviewer for the Washington Monthly, she also writes about museums, history, and culture, and is working on a history of tourism in Washington, D.C.

Stephen Braun, co-author of Merchant of Death, a 2007 book profiling the world’s most notorious arms dealer, is a prize-winning former national correspondent and editor with The Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press. His stories ranged from presidential political coverage to foreign and domestic terrorism to national and international investigative reporting. Braun most recently worked at the Associated Press for 12 years, including a stint as the news service’s national security editor in Washington. Before joining AP, Braun worked for 25 years at the Los Angeles Times as a national correspondent based in Washington and Chicago and as an editor and reporter in Los Angeles. His investigative reporting after the September 11th attacks was included in a Times entry that won an Overseas Press Club award, and he was among a group of Times reporters whose coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots won a Pulitzer Prize for general reporting. His investigative work also led to an examination of the Taliban’s covert use of Russian-owned aircraft to import weapons and operatives. Merchant of Death, with journalist Douglas Farah, profiled the man who owned those planes—Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was later sent to federal prison for his crimes, and sent back to Russia by the Biden administration in exchange for basketball star Brittney Griner. Braun has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School and an invited speaker at many leading media outlets, universities, and think tanks.

Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is Professor of Humanities in the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. He is the author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, and Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America. His book on the battle of Gettysburg, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, was a New York Times best seller in 2013. His newest books are Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy and the American Experiment (Knopf, 2024), which won the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Prize, and The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

Judy Pasternak, author of Yellow Dirt, her acclaimed work about the slow-motion environmental catastrophe in the Navajo Nation set off by uranium mining that fueled the Manhattan Project and Cold War-era nuclear weapons. She was the founding editor of Gartner Business Quarterly and a member of The Los Angeles Times’s national investigations team. Her work has won awards for literary, environmental, and investigative journalism. She has also been a juror for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, and the Robert F. Kennedy Awards for Excellence in Journalism.

Terence Samuel is a veteran journalist who has written extensively about the changes in American life over the last 40 years. He is the author of the 2010 book The Upper House: A Journey Behind the Closed Doors of the United States Senate, and his work as a political columnist was anthologized in Best American Political Writing of 2009. Samuel is the former editor-in-chief at USA Today and served as Vice President & Executive Editor at NPR. From 2011 to 2017, he was a politics editor at The Washington Post, overseeing White House and congressional coverage. He began his career as a writing fellow at The Village Voice in New York. He later was a reporter at The Roanoke Times & World News, a national correspondent at both The Philadelphia Inquirer and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and chief congressional correspondent at U.S. News & World Report.

Haley Sweetland Edwards is a journalist based in Boise, Idaho, and a longtime contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. Before moving back home to the American West, she was the Deputy Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for TIME. Earlier, she was a freelance reporter in the Middle East and the Caucasus, writing for the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and other publications. She lived in Yemen and reported from a half-dozen countries in the Middle East from 2009 to 2012, thanks in part to a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and the Overseas Press Club Fellowship. She started her career as a resident reporter at the Seattle Times. Edwards’ book, Shadow Courts: The Tribunals That Rule Global Trade, was published by Columbia Global Reports in 2016. It’s about a small provision, Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), that appears in nearly every trade deal and allows foreign investors to sue sovereign nations outside their own court systems.

ABOUT KUKULA KAPOOR GLASTRIS

The beloved and brilliant books editor of the Washington Monthly, Kukula (“Kuku” to her legions of friends and fans), made the book review section home to some of the magazine’s best thinking and writing. A keen editor and diplomatic manager of writers, she served as den mother and provisioner of delicious late-night home-cooked meals to a generation of young Washington Monthly journalists. “I’ve never met anyone whose combination of personal goodness, plus intellectual and professional abilities, exceeded Kukula’s,” wrote James Fallows in The Atlantic.

To learn more about Kukula’s life, please read Kuku: A Love Story.

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