Excellence in Audio Storytelling, Long-form
ABOUT THE WORK: In 2012, a blind legal activist named Chen Guangcheng escaped house arrest in his native Shandong and took refuge at the US embassy in Beijing, igniting a diplomatic firestorm between two superpowers. Less than a decade later, he stood on stage at the 2020 Republican National Convention to endorse Donald Trump, and rallied with January 6 insurrectionists outside Capitol Hill. The 8-part narrative podcast series tells the incredible story of Guangcheng from China to the US, from human rights icon to MAGA fanatic, and what one man’s transpacific journey reveals about the two places he has called home, the shifting dynamics in and between both countries, and the lessons in power and the pursuit of freedom.
The series is hosted by Alison Klayman, Colin Jones, and Yangyang Cheng, who reported on the story over 18 months, gathering tens of hours of interviews with dozens of people and gaining unprecedented access to Chen Guangcheng himself, his inner circle, and members of the Obama administration who negotiated his passage from China to the US. The detailed and groundbreaking reporting is complemented by in-depth analysis rooted in rich knowledge about both countries, as well as introspective, personal perspectives from the three hosts. Alison and Colin lived in China in the late 2000s and spent their early careers chronicling another famous Chinese dissident, the artist Ai Weiwei. Guangcheng’s path kept crossing their own, unsettling what they thought they knew about China and its dissidents.
Yangyang Cheng is a Research Scholar in Law and Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, where her work focuses on the development of science and technology in China and U.S.‒China relations. Her essays have appeared in outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, The New Statesman, The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, and WIRED, and have received several awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA), Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA), and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Her literary criticism has received the 2024 Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing from The Washington Monthly and a 2022 People's Choice Award from the Los Angeles Review of Books. Cheng is an editor at the Made in China Journal and an external senior advisor to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science's Lise Meitner Research Group, "China in the Global System of Science." She is also a co-host, writer, and producer of the acclaimed narrative podcast series, Dissident at the Doorstep, from Crooked Media. She serves on the inaugural jury for the Baifang Schell China Books Prize from Asia Society, and has been a judge for the James Beard Award in the journalism category. Born and raised in China, Cheng received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago and her bachelor’s from the University of Science and Technology of China’s School for the Gifted Young. Before joining Yale, she worked on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for over a decade, most recently at Cornell University and as an LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. For her work on the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC, she is a co-recipient, alongside thousands of colleagues, for the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
John Lee is an award-winning artist, illustrator, and educator. Originally from Memphis, TN he currently lives and works in New York City.
Boen Wang is a writer, audio producer, and adjunct instructor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Richard Yeh is a multidisciplinary journalist with a background in public radio and street photography. From 2007 to 2021, he was a staff producer, editor, and photographer at New York Public Radio, where he ran the daily radio broadcast of NPR’s All Things Considered on WNYC and directed the newsroom’s internship program. He has also produced for Reveal, the New Yorker Radio Hour, and Studio 360. Since 2018, he’s been teaching audio at NYU, Columbia, and CUNY. A native of Taipei who’s lived in New York since 1992, he was a 2017 Bringing Home the World fellow at the International Center For Journalist.
Wudan Yan is an award-winning narrative journalist, fact-checker, and entrepreneur based in Seattle, Washington. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, California Sunday Magazine, High Country News, MIT Technology Review, The New York Times, Popular Mechanics and beyond. She is a multi-grantee of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and has also received grants from UC Berkeley, the Institute of Journalism and Natural Resources, and the International Womens Media Foundation to support her work. On top of her editorial work, Wudan has founded two companies: The Writers’ Co-op, a business podcast and learning academy for freelance creatives, and Factual, a fact-checking agency.
Honorable Mention: Ronia Cabansag, “The Dish” (1/2/3), Michigan Public
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