Community Fellow
Abigail Higgins
Howard University
Abigail's Story
Abigail Higgins is a co-founder and senior editor at The 51st, D.C.'s worker-led, nonprofit local newsroom. She edits breaking news, features, and accountability journalism and her reporting includes contributing to a Pulitzer-Prize-winning series on the opioid epidemic’s dramatically disproportionate impact on older Black men in partnership with The Baltimore Banner and The New York Times. She is also the First Vice President of the National Writers Union.
She’s worked as a freelance journalist for over a decade, contributing to publications including The Washington Post, The Guardian, Time, The New Republic, NPR, Al Jazeera, The Nation, and The Seattle Times. In 2023, she investigated repressive labor practices at Amazon, McDonald’s, and Chuck E Cheese for The Guardian as part of a partnership with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, NBC News, Reuters, and The New Yorker. She worked many years as a foreign correspondent in East Africa where she covered the refugee crisis caused by the war in South Sudan, Al Shabab's 2015 attack on Garissa University, and Burundi’s 2015 failed military coup.
Her editing experience includes working as a breaking news, features, and health editor at DCist/WAMU and as an editor at Empowerment Avenue, where she works with incarcerated journalists. She was also the Managing Editor of BRIGHT Magazine, a global health and development publication.
The story she co-reported on D.C.’s opioid crisis won two Dateline Awards from The D.C. Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. She was a 2021 National Press Foundation Fellow for coverage of opioids and addiction, a 2021 Reporting the U.S. Workplace Fellow at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, a 2016 International Women's Media Foundation Fellow, a 2016 Uncovering Security: Emerging Threats Fellow with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and her reporting on urban slums was awarded First Place in Special Reports by the Society of Professional Journalists.
Abigail's Research
Health Equity Beat
Abigail is launching a health equity beat at The 51st, the worker-led nonprofit local newsroom she co-founded in D.C. The 51st was founded on the belief that all D.C. residents deserve a more equitable and just place to live, and that local journalism is meant to make people’s lives better — telling stories about the city’s health equity is a critical part of this work. As lead editor and reporter on the publication’s new section, she will report several large narrative stories or investigations into topics such as the opioid crisis and maternal health, while also working with a network of freelance journalists to publish a series of additional stories on similar topics.