Erika Hayasaki is a journalist based in Southern California whose feature stories appear in The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Wired, The Atlantic, The Guardian, National Geographic, and others. 

She is a professor in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine. A former national writer for the Los Angeles Times, Erika is the author of two nonfiction books:  The Death Class and Somewhere Sisters, which was named an NPR Best Book of the Year in 2022 and received a Nautilus Book Award in Journalism and Investigative Reporting, honoring books about social justice. 

As an independent journalist, her feature stories have also appeared in The Verge, The Cut, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, MIT Technology Review, Men’s Health, Elle, InStyle, Glamour, Foreign Policy, Slate, The New Republic, Newsweek, Time, and Narratively. 

In 2025, she received the Longform Narrative Award from the National Association of Science Writers. Her work has been honored by the Association of Sunday Feature Editors, the Society for Features Journalism, Longform's Best of Science writing of 2016 and 2017, and anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing 2025 book series edited by Susan Orlean. 

Erika served as chair of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize Nominating Jury in Feature Writing, and as a features juror in 2025. She also chaired the 2025 J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Awards at Columbia University, supporting nonfiction books on topics of political or social concern. 

She has received support for her own reporting from the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism at CUNY in 2026; the Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellowship in 2022; and the Alicia Patterson Fellowship in science and environmental reporting in 2019, later serving as a judge and member of the board. 

As a mentor and professor who is passionate about helping diverse communities tell stories, Erika is a member of the planning team for the Institute for Independent Journalists, led by women of color who are devoted to improving conditions for freelancers from underrepresented backgrounds, and is part of the Center for Storytelling at UC Irvine.

Connect to Erika via LinkedIn, or subscribe to her Substack, The Reported Essay, for freelance tips, writer and editor Q&As, and nonfiction craft discussions.