The Asian American Journalists Association, which has honored excellence in journalism for nearly 40 years, celebrates “the power of journalism that informs, investigates, uplifts communities, and tells the stories that matter most.” This year’s winners include several UC Berkeley Journalism alums — including 2026 graduate Ava Hu — who will be honored during a gala at the AAJA’s annual convention June 24-28, 2026, in Minneapolis.
Ava Hu (‘26)
Hu won the Student Excellence in Written Reporting category for “Deported over a speeding ticket? Dozens of US students’ visas abruptly revoked,” for The Guardian.
ENTRY SUBMISSION:
This was among the earliest reports to identify what was happening. At the time, only a few brief wire reports had mentioned visa cancellations, with little detail or on-the-ground reporting.
In reality, many students’ SEVIS records had been terminated, a far more severe action. A visa revocation limits international travel; a SEVIS termination immediately strips a student of lawful status.
By centering three verified student cases, my reporting clarified this critical distinction and documented the policy’s consequences. Students received no prior notice. Some terminations were triggered by minor records from years ago; others involved cases still pending, and in some instances no conviction at all. Even university international offices could not initially explain the basis for the cancellations.
The story translated a complex bureaucratic issue into human terms. I reported late into the night, documenting the confusion and fear of young international students whose academic futures were abruptly disrupted. The article circulated widely within affected student communities, helping readers see patterns across cases rather than isolated incidents.
In the weeks that followed, nationwide, more than 70 lawsuits were filed against ICE and USCIS challenging the terminations. I tracked these legal developments while reporting for three outlets in English and Mandarin: The Guardian, The Daily Californian, and Initium Media, providing ongoing updates as the situation evolved.
Self-portrait, 2026. Kori Suzuki (’23)
Kori Suzuki (’23) won the Excellence in Written Reporting, Features category for “The murder, the museum and the monument,” for High Country News.
ENTRY SUBMISSION:
Our narrative feature, “The murder, the monument and the museum,” takes readers inside the discovery of a long-lost Japanese American monument and the fight it ignited over historical memory.
The piece opens in 1943 at a federal detention camp called the Topaz Relocation Center, deep in the central Utah desert. That year, an American soldier shot and killed an unarmed Japanese immigrant named James Wakasa as he walked along the fence. Furious, a group of prisoners built a monument in Wakasa’s name. The federal government sent in soldiers in riot gear and ordered the monument destroyed.
Eighty years later, two archaeologists and a historical researcher found the monument still buried in the desert. But what came next wasn’t a moment of rediscovery or healing. Instead, the museum tasked with preserving Topaz excavated the monument without involving any of the camp’s survivors or their descendants — repeating, in the eyes of some Japanese Americans, the same patterns of violence and erasure.
High Country News spent more than a year reporting on these events in both Utah and California, where most descendants of Topaz live now. Through dozens of interviews, hours of recorded meetings and hundreds of pages of public records, we pieced together how the monument’s discovery and excavation unfolded. But our narrative also goes further, examining what it means to unearth pieces of history, the troubled legacy of museums and archaeology, and how remembering itself is an act of power.
What emerges is a story about how the United States is still uncovering the violence and history of the last network of federal detention camps it built — and how the country is struggling to reckon with what it finds.
In a social media post, Kori said he was indebted to a number of mentors at Berkeley Journalism who encouraged him to continue with this story including his instructors: Shereen Marisol Meraji, who spent hours listening to him talk about his first reporting trip to Topaz, Utah; Adam Hochschild, who saw the first drafts of this story emerge, and Lisa Armstrong, who he wrote “taught me that our role is to understand the systems of power that shape why events unfold in the ways they do.”
Yutao Chen (’19). Photo by Meiying Wu (’20)
Yutao Chen (’19) won the Excellence in Online/Digital Journalism, Immersive Storytelling category for “Russia bombs Ukraine almost every night. This is what it sounds like” for The Washington Post.
ENTRY SUBMISSION:
By weaving together compelling audio clips and atmospheric photography, the piece created an alternative, immersive way to tell stories from the war in Ukraine. The goal was to make the experience palpable and to communicate the relentless fear and stress, along with the deeply traumatic reality of sheltering through bombardments. Audio clips were used to drive the storytelling, combining the eerie lament of sirens, the buzz of drones, the boom-ricochet of ballistic missiles with moody and cinematic photographs to deepen the narrative’s emotional impact.
Cecilia Lei (’19)
Cecilia Lei (’19) won the Excellence in Written Reporting, News category for “Bay Area Japanese Americans Draw on WWII Trauma to Resist Deportation Threats,” for KQED.
ENTRY SUBMISSION:
One of Trump’s earliest executive orders when he re-entered the White House was to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport undocumented migrants in the U.S.
As news stories started referencing the centuries-old wartime law, there were only brief mentions of how the act was used to incarcerate Japanese and Japanese Americans during WW2.
My story quickly met the moment by spotlighting the local Bay Area Japanese American community that was already mobilizing and organizing to protest potential use of the law, which had led to generations of trauma in their community.
In this story, I spoke to both survivors of the WW2 incarceration camps, and young Japanese American activists to demonstrate the intergenerational community organizing that was taking place, and how the Japanese American community was leveraging their own family histories and experiences to help build solidarity with other vulnerable immigrant groups that are being targeted by the Trump administration.
The story helped propel the work of one organization in particular, Tsuru for Solidarity, and helped link the current moment to the painful WW2 experience of Japanese families. Especially as the survivors age and the number of survivors who are still around to share this history start to shrink, it was important to resurface this story in the news cycle at that very moment.
Sadako Nimura Kashiwagi, 91, holds a photo of her parents, Juninhi Nimura and Shizuko Nimura, at her home in Berkeley on Jan. 15, 2025. Sadako was incarcerated at Tule Lake concentration camp, at the age of 9, where she lived there with her family for four years. (Gina Castro/KQED)
About the winners
Yutao Chen is an interactive designer, photographer and filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. He is a senior product designer at The Washington Post, where he designs and builds multimedia storytelling experiences. Before joining The Post in 2020, he served as multimedia editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Originally from Shanghai, his work has been recognized by the Society for News Design, the National Press Photographers Association, the Online Journalism Awards, and others.
Ava Hu is a bilingual reporter focusing on data reporting and local accountability stories. She covers immigration, higher education and public records, with works published by The Guardian, Houston Chronicle, AAPI Data, AsAm News and Initium Media. Hu holds a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism from Syracuse University and recently earned a master’s degree in data and business reporting at the University of California, Berkeley.
Cecilia Lei is a reporter, producer and podcast host based in the Bay Area. She covers immigration, the criminal legal system, AAPI issues, as well as other local communities. Her work has appeared in KQED, Apple News, SF Chronicle, NPR and Vox Media. Cecilia is also a co-founder of COYOTE Media Collective, a worker-owned newsroom in the Bay Area.
Kori Suzuki is a Japanese American journalist and photographer based in San Diego, California. He is a current staff reporter at KPBS, San Diego’s NPR and PBS station, where he covers a regional beat in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands including South San Diego County and the Imperial Valley. His personal work focuses on the environment, race and identity. He was born and raised in the Bay Area.