Joshua Sokol is a freelance science journalist based in his hometown of Raleigh, NC. After majoring in English Literature and Astronomy at Swarthmore College, he worked as a data analyst for the Hubble Space Telescope. He then attended MIT’s graduate program in science writing from 2014-2015, where he was a
CASW Taylor-Blakeslee Fellow.
Since then, his stories have appeared in
Astronomy,
The Atlantic,
Audubon,
The Boston Globe,
ESPN the Magazine,
Hakai,
Mosaic,
National Geographic,
New Scientist,
The New York Times,
NOVA Next,
Quanta,
Science,
Scientific American,
Smithsonian,
The Wall Street Journal,
The Washington Post, and
Wired.
Two of Joshua's pieces are reprinted in
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020, four more of his stories have been listed in the "Other Notables" section of the series, and one of his pieces is reprinted in
The Best Writing on Mathematics 2021.2017: received the American Astronomical Society's
Jonathan Eberhart Planetary Sciences Journalism Award2018: received CASW’s
Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, an annual prize given to a science journalist under 30
2019: won the
David N. Schramm prize from the American Astronomical Society's High-Energy Astrophysics Division, received a
mentored science journalism grant from CASW, and spent a month embedded in ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration as a
Journalist Fellow 2020: received an
American Institute of Physics Science Communication Award and the
American Geophysical Union Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism 2021: received a yearlong reporting fellowship from the
Alicia Patterson Foundation to focus on the environmental status of the night sky and space
You can also read an
overly honest accounting of Joshua's workday over at the Open Notebook's "Day in the Life" series, see him retroactively justify writing choices in this
Open Notebook Storygram, or learn about his
2022 reporting on space imagery in the Swarthmore Bulletin.
