May Jeong

May Jeong is a writer for Vanity Fair and a fellow at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She lived and reported from Afghanistan between 2013 and 2017, and was awarded the South Asian Journalist Association’s Daniel Pearl Award and the Bayeux Calvados Normandy Award for War Correspondents. She was awarded the 2022 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for her upcoming book on sex work.

She has written for American and British publications: The New York Times, Intercept, Guardian, London Review of Books, Harper’s, New York Times Magazine and others. Through 2015 and 2016, she conducted two major investigations, one on the bombing of the MSF hospital in Kunduz, and another on a drone strike that killed an entire family in Kunar. Since 2013, she has covered various aspects of America’s ongoing war in the country – the results of drone strikes, airstrikes, suicide attacks, as well as failures in border policy, empathy and development theory. Previously she worked for Reuters newswire, Canada’s Globe and Mail and the Daily Star in Beirut. Jeong has also lived in India and Pakistan and from 2017 to 2020 was a visiting scholar at New York University.

She now lives on land ceded by the Lenape people in the Treaty of Shackamaxon in 1682, also known as Brooklyn, New York.