Abigail Higgins is a journalist in Washington D.C. with a decade of experience reporting across Africa and The United States. Her work appears in The Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Guardian, The Nation, NPR, The New Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, Al Jazeera, and The Seattle Times, among others.
She covers poverty, inequality, gender, health, and labor and her current reporting includes investigating the corporate landlords driving America’s eviction crisis, the way nurses and home health care workers radicalized by the pandemic are fighting labor abuses in for-profit healthcare, the U.S. battle over sex work decriminalization, and the ways the Covid-19 pandemic is exacerbating maternal mortality for black and indigenous women.
Her coverage in Africa included the refugee crisis caused by the war in South Sudan, Al Shabab's 2015 attack on Garissa University that killed almost 147 students, and Burundi’s failed military coup in the 2015 election. She was a 2021 National Press Foundation Fellow for coverage of opioids and addiction, a 2021 Reporting the U.S. Workplace Fellow at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, a 2016 International Women's Media Foundation Fellow, a 2016 Uncovering Security: Emerging Threats Fellow with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and her reporting on urban slums was awarded First Place in Special Reports by the Society of Professional Journalists.
She’s an experienced editor, currently working part-time as a breaking news, features, and health editor at DCist/WAMU, Washington’s NPR station. She is an editor at Empowerment Avenue, working with incarcerated journalists to get their stories and reporting published in major media outlets. She was also the Managing Editor of BRIGHT Magazine, a global health and development publication.
She has researched climate change and air pollution for the United Nations Environment Program, as well as working as a researcher and consultant for The World Bank and other United Nations agencies. She’s also served as an expert reviewer at Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal at Georgetown University.
She is the Co-Chair of the Freelance Solidarity Project, the Digital Media Division of the National Writers Union where she organizes to improve working conditions for freelance journalists and other precarious workers. She’s also a member of the IWW Freelance Journalist Union.