New Havener makes good: Award-winning NYT mag writer Jazmine Hughes.
WSJ
WSJ's Evan Gershkovich.
In the space of half a day, Jazmine Hughes went from celebrating reaching a milestone in her dream career — to learning that a friend who had realized his dreams, too, was now locked in a Russian prison.
Hughes, a 31-year-old native New Havener and Hillhouse grad, is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. She writes penetrating, revealing, and fun profiles of celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg, Viola Davis, Questlove, Lil Nas X, and Kelela.
Last week that work won her an “Ellie” profile-writing award from the American Society of Magazine Editors for “deeply observed portraits of major culture figures that revealed their subjects with insight and humor.” The award felt like a validation of the hard work Hughes has put in since college building a career at the top echelons of American journalism.
Then came the news from Moscow about Hughes’ 31-year-old friend Evan Gershkovich, a pal from their days starting out together at the Times before he moved to his parents’ native Russia and became a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.
“I woke up the day after the awards, hungover with a box of Domino’s next to me, to a news alert,” Hughes said during a conversation Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
“I saw the news alert, and I was like, ‘Oh that’s so funny. Someone with Gersh’s name has been arrested in Russia .’
“Then I opened my phone and I had 10 texts from friends being like, ‘Is that your friend?’ It feels totally bizarre bananas to have that and the Ellie have happened in the past in the same 12 hours.”
Hughes and “Gersh” lived four blocks from each other in Brooklyn when they started working at the Times. They hung out at work. They hung out after work. They played beer pong. They and his roommates went to bars like Friends and Lovers and returned to his apartment, where he’d cook “midnight eggs” for everyone.
“He wanted to go to Moscow. I wanted to be a magazine writer,” Hughes recalled.
Hughes rose through the ranks at the NYT. Gershkovich made it to Moscow, then landed the WSJ posting a year ago amid a war with Ukraine that made reporting in Russia a perilous pursuit. He kept at it — until Russian authorities arrested him last week. His imprisonment has sparked worldwide condemnation and created the latest wedge in U.S.-Russian relations.
So, amid the lift of her award, Hughes has spent the past week worrying about her friend, refreshing her phone for updates about his predicament, staying in touch with mutual friends and colleagues, connecting people who are seeking to aid the cause of freeing him. She urged people to write supportive letters to Gershkovich at freegershkovich@gmail.com, where they will be translated into Russian and forwarded to him in prison.
She also said that people are planning to leave an extra plate out at their Passover seders this week in honor of Gershkovich, who is Jewish.
”At the end of the day, beyond being my friend, he’s a journalist who was assigned to do his job. And if this sort of thing can happen to him, it can happen to so many other people,” Hughes reflected. “We have to keep this at the forefront of our minds and work to make sure this isn’t happening to anybody else.”
Click on the above video to watch the full conversation with Jazmine Hughes, which includes discussion about her career and her approach to writing profiles, on WNHH FM’s“Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe to“Dateline New Haven” and here to subscribe to other WNHH FM podcasts.