I am pleased to announce that Chicago Health, Caregiving magazine and six of its creative staff have won 14 prestigious journalistic awards and recognition for their work in 2020.
National awards went to Kate Silver from the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) for her story titled, Learning from the Dead: The enduring gift of donating a body to science, as well as to Valerie Nikolas from the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons (AAOS) for her story, A Secondary Healthcare Crisis? Backlog of orthopedic surgeries Due to Covid-19 May Have Long-Lasting Effects.
In the Illinois Women’s Press Association’s 2020 Mate E. Palmer Contest, first place awards went to writers Katie Scarlett Brandt for her feature story The Great Unequalizer: Chicago faced severe health inequities long before Covid-19. Whose job is it to solve the problem?; Lorna Collier for her specialty article, In Covid-19 Long-Haul Syndrome, Symptoms Continue for Months; Photographer Heidi Wagner for her photo essay, The Passions Project: Capturing lives filled with enthusiasm, vitality and meaning; Eve Becker and Katie Scarlett Brandt for “Editing for Print or Online”; and designer Erin Sullivan for her layout of Power to the People: Senior Activists Make Their Voices Heard. Katie and Erin also won national first-place finishes from the National Federation of Press Women.
Finally, The Chicago Headline Club awarded Kate Silver the prestigious Peter Lisagor award for her story Learning from the Dead. Katie Scarlett Brandt was chosen as a Lisagor finalist for her story The Great Unequalizer.
These awards follow recent honors from the Illinois Women’s Press Association (2017, 2018, 2019), the Chicago Headline Club (2017), a 2019 MORE award from the AAOS and a 2016 award from the AJSA which awarded writer Kate Silver for her story “Needles in the Cornfields” an early story about the rise of heroin deaths and the failure of state-funded treatment programs in Illinois. Kate’s story was one of only a handful recognized by ASJA alongside stories from writers from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired and others.
Since 2016, fourteen Chicago Health and Caregiving writers, designers and photographers have earned awards for journalistic excellence.
