Episode 26: Eli Saslow

Eli Saslow is a reporter at the Washington Post. Earlier this year, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his series of stories on food stamps in a post-recession America. Over the course of 2013, Saslow reported and wrote six extraordinary stories that focused on everything from a town in Rhode Island where one-third of the residents receive food stamps to a program that uses school buses to take lunches to kids in rural Tennessee during the summer. When Matt Tullis talked with him, he was writing a series of stories on another hot-button issue – immigration. Now he is writing about drug addiction in America. In July 2016, he wrote "How's Amanda: A story of truth, lies and American addiction." Saslow was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing in 2013 for his story “Life of a Salesman.” That story looked at the suffering American economy through the eyes of a man who sells swimming pools. Last year, he wrote a heart-breaking story that focused on a family whose first-grade son was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting. In 2008, Saslow covered the presidential campaign, and he’s also chronicled the president’s life inside the White House. As if his work at the Washington Post doesn’t keep him busy enough, Saslow also occasionally writes for ESPN: The Magazine, and has been included in Best American Sports Writing twice.