Nominations open for Reed Environmental Writing Award

Today the Southern Environmental Law Center announced a call for entries for the 2025 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award, celebrating writers who achieve both literary excellence and offer extraordinary insight into the South’s natural treasures and environmental challenges. Nominations are welcome from anyone, including readers, authors, and publishers.

The Reed Award recognizes outstanding writing on the Southern environment in two categories. The Book Category for works of nonfiction (not self-published) and the Journalism Category for newspaper, magazine, and digital writing published by a recognized institution such as a news organization, university, or nonprofit group.

As the South continues to grow and change, writers are increasingly exploring our relationship with the natural world and the environmental challenges we face as a region. SELC’s Reed Environmental Writing Award honors the best of these storytellers.

ERIN MALEC, DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS

Authors have often drawn on the region’s unique natural treasures for inspiration and insight—from natural treasures such as the Okefenokee Swamp of Georgia to the mountains of western North Carolina to the rolling fields of the Virginia Piedmont.

Each year, Reed Award winners are selected by a national panel of judges that includes leading environmental writers, journalists, and advocates. This award also honors and celebrates the late Phillip D. Reed, a distinguished attorney, committed environmental activist, and a founding trustee of SELC.

Last year’s winners were Emily Strasser, author of Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History, and David Folkenflik with NPR, and Mario Ariza and Miranda Green with Floodlight, for their story, “In the Southeast, power company money flows to news sites that attack their critics”.