Prize Winner 2018:
Brett Sokol
Brett Sokol is a journalist based in Miami, where he is a contributing writer on the arts for The New York Times. His writing on cultural issues has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Miami Herald, New York magazine, and The Awl.
In addition to winning the Rabkin Prize, his writing on Miami's cultural scene was named Best Criticism by the Society of Professional Journalists’ Green Eyeshade Awards, while a series of dispatches from Havana, Cuba, were named Best Foreign Reporting. He also won SPJ's Sigma Delta Chi award for Arts/Entertainment Journalism for reporting that led to an FBI probe and the firing of the Orlando Museum of Art’s director after it displayed 25 Basquiat paintings of disputed authenticity. He is writing a book about the art world, The Basquiat Hustle, for the Simon & Schuster imprint One Signal.
Sokol is also the co-founder and editor of Letter16 Press, a nonprofit publishing house spotlighting the work of pre-digital era photographers focused on the sweet spot between photojournalism and art. Published books by Letter16 Press include We Are EverywhereandWe Shall Be Free: Charles Hashim's Miami 1977-1983, Shtetl in the Sun: Andy Sweet's South Beach 1977-1980, and Artists in Residence: Downtown New York in the 1970s.