Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard have named the five winners and the two finalists of the 2019 Lukas Prize Project Awards. The awards will be presented at a ceremony on Tuesday, May 7, at the Nieman Foundation in Cambridge, Mass.

Maurice Chammah, a staff writer at the Marshall Project, has won a J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award for Let the Lord Sort Them: Texas and the Death Penalty’s Rise and Fall in America (Crown), and Steven Dudley, co-founder and co-director of InSight Crime, a think tank that investigates organized crime in the Americas, has won the same prize for Mara: The Making of the MS13 (Hanover Square Press).

Shane Bauer, a senior reporter for Mother Jones, has won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment (Penguin Press). Journalist Lauren Hilgers was named a finalist for Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown (Crown).

Andrew Delbanco, Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University and president of the Teagle Foundation, has won the Mark Lynton History Prize for The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War (Penguin Press), and Jeffrey C. Stewart, a professor of black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has won for The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford University Press). David W. Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of American History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, was a finalist for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon & Schuster).

Established in 1998, the Lukas Prize Project honors American nonfiction writing, and is co-administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and sponsored by the family of the late Mark Lynton, a historian and senior executive at the firm Hunter Douglas in the Netherlands. The J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Awards come with a $25,000 purse, while the the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize boasts a $10,000 purse.