Steven Thrasher
Steven William Thrasher, a Contributing Editor at BuzzFeed, is the 2012 National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association’s Journalist of the Year. Steven spent three years as a staff writer for the Village Voice, where he wrote long format features and investigative articles, including 20 cover stories. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Out, Rolling Stone, the Daily Beast, the Advocate, and Time Out New York. As a radio reporter and producer, he regularly contributes to Marketplace and is a guest host for the Michelangelo Signorile Show on SiriusXM QutQ 108. In 2007, Steven spent a year traveling America recording oral history for the NPR StoryCorps project, and his radio work has been heard onMorning Edition, All Things Considered and News and Notes.
Much of his work discusses the intersections of race, class, sexual identity, religion and politics. Steven frequently appears as a guest to speak about these issues on WNYC, WWRL and KISS-FM in New York, as well as on national radio programs like The Takeaway. He is a board member of the non-profit production company T-Street Media.
Steven was trained in writing and filmmaking at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he was a University Scholar and received his BFA. He’s worked as a writers’ assistant at Saturday Night Liveunder head writer Tina Fey, and as a crewmember on the feature films Storytelling (directed by Todd Solondz), The Door in the Floor (based upon John Irving’s novelA Widow for One Year), and HBO’s The Laramie Project.
Steven is a Sloan Foundation Science Writing Fellow and a 2010 recipient of the Anti-Violence Project’s Courage Award. That year, he also penned the viral internet hit “White America Has Lost Its Mind,” which was read by over a million people, translated into Polish, and lauded by Governor David Paterson, Toure, and Roger Ebert. In 2011, he won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism fromHunter College for his story “Ronnie’s Kids,” as well as a Feature Writing Award from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies for his profile of“Bad Lieutenant” Dan Choi. In 2012, the National Lesbian & Gay Journalist’s Association named him NLGJA Journalist of the Year.