The 2026 Kukula Award Winners

The Washington Monthly proudly announces the winners of the 2026 Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing—the only journalism prize dedicated to highlighting and encouraging exemplary 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.

In our smaller publications category, the winner is Dan Piepenbring, published in Harper’s Magazine, for his engaging and wide-ranging review of three new books—Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (MCD), by Cory Doctorow; Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road (University of Regina Press), by Ken Wilson; and Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore (Princeton University Press), by Adrienne Mayor.

In our larger publications category, the top prize goes to Rhoda Feng in The New Republic, for her moving and sobering review of the bestselling Chinese memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing (Astra House), by Hu Anyan (translated by Jack Hargreaves).

The winners will each receive a $1,000 cash prize.

A panel of six judges—veteran journalists, authors, and reviewers—selected this year’s winners from nearly 80 outstanding submissions published across a range of print and digital outlets in 2025. Winners were honored for their clear and artful exposition, original and persuasive thesis, and ability to enlighten readers with new and valuable information. Judges gave priority to works of public affairs, politics, history, and biography.

Dan Piepenbring skillfully tackles three new books with seemingly disparate themes—the greed of big tech monopolies, the despoliation of Canadian wilderness, and ancient myths inspired by natural wonders and disasters—in a cohesive review featuring what the judges called a “beautiful, fun and easy” style of writing. “He has the essayist’s gift for making the personal universal,” noted Terence Samuel. Fellow judge Allen Guelzo didn’t want to embrace Piepenbring’s somber thesis, but he couldn’t resist his argument: The review “kept coming back to me in ways the others didn’t, like one of those tunes you can’t get out of your head,” he reflected.

In the larger category, the judges praised Rhoda Feng’s review of Hu Anyan’s eye-opening memoir of life among the Chinese migrant class. “Feng brings the reader into a world that even those familiar with modern autocratic China might only slightly know—the hidden underclass of migrant workers known as the ‘floating population’ who ‘build the country’s skyscrapers, guard its gates, sweep its streets and deliver its parcels’,” said judge Steve Braun. Her review “provides what all great reviews of nonfiction strive for—a deep dive into the importance, milieu and history of the book’s subject and an incisive take on how well the book succeeds in what it sets out to achieve.” Notably, Feng also offers “critical context about the rise of the gig economy, publication and censorship in China,” added judge Sara Bhatia. Fellow judge Haley Sweetland Edwards commends Feng’s deep knowledge of the subject matter (and her comparison of the original book in Chinese with an English-language edition) to explore “what has been likely excised by censors and what has been allowed into print. That provides context for readers, like me, who might not have otherwise understood the importance of the book.”

“This year’s winning writers set a standard that all of us who work in the field of serious nonfiction book reviewing should challenge ourselves to meet,” said Paul Glastris, the Washington Monthly’s editor in chief and Kukula’s husband of 31 years.

The judges also selected four exceptional finalists in each Kukula Award category.

Finalists for the 2026 Kukula Award in the small publications category were:

Diya Isha in The Swaddle, for her review of Mother Mary Comes to Me (Simon & Schuster), by Arundhati Roy Michael J. Kramer in U.S. Intellectual History Book Review, for his review of two essay collections on social criticism and history (Verso Books), by Adam Shatz and George Scialabba Paul Schofield in Jacobin magazine, for his review of The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism (Routledge), by Matt McManus Ed Simon in The Los Angeles Review of Books, for his review of Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (Zondervan), by Ross Douthat

Among larger publications, the judges chose these finalists:

Jacob Bacharach in The New Republic, for his review of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (MCD), by Cory Doctorow Julia M. Klein in The Atlantic, for her review of A Flower Traveled in My Blood (Simon & Schuster), by Haley Cohen Gilliland Laura Miller in Slate, for her review of the memoir Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President (St. Martin’s Press), by E. Jean Carroll Katy Waldman in The New Yorker, for her review of three books on modern-day feminism: Powerfully Likeable (Harmony Press), by Kate Mason; All the Cool Girls Get Fired (Gallery Books), by Laura Brown and Kristina O’Neill; and Fly! A Woman’s Guide to Financial Freedom and Building a Life You Love (Matt Holt Books), by Steph Wagner

“Nonfiction book reviewing plays a key role in transmitting hard-won reporting, research, and ideas on major issues of the day to policymakers and citizens who can’t possibly read more than a fraction of the important books published each year,” said Glastris. “This year’s winning pieces illuminate many such issues—from gender and identity politics to the ongoing impact of the Trump presidency on questions of truth and lies; from the perils of the gig economy to the way ‘enshittification’ captures the zeitgeist of our dependence on big tech; and from political censorship in China today to a painful personal reckoning with state-sponsored political terror of Argentina’s past. No matter the subject, the Kukula Award highlights the work of the talented individuals who practice this undervalued craft—work Kukula devoted herself to publishing,” he added.

The Washington Monthly congratulates each of the 2026 winners and their publications for their commitment to the important role of serious book reviewing.

ABOUT OUR 2026 JUDGES

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

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 is the co-author of Merchant of Death, a 2007 book profiling the world’s most notorious arms dealer, and a prize-winning former national correspondent and editor with The Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press. Over 25 years at the Times, Braun served 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 on many leading media outlets, universities, and think tanks.   Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is a 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 is the 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 and 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, DC 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.

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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