Rachel Aviv

Rachel Aviv is a a staff writer at The New Yorker, who 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. She is completing her first book, Strangers To Ourselves, forthcoming from FSG in 2022.

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."