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ASJA 2002 Writing Awards
ASJA honors its members who have produced some of the best work of the year with the annual ASJA Awards. Here are this year's winners. GENERAL Creatures of the Deep (Firefly Books) by Erich Hoyt Erich Hoyt is a Canadian-American author and marine naturalist living in North Berwick, Scotland. His books include Orca: The Whale Called Killer (Dutton/ Firefly Books), The Earth Dwellers (Simon & Schuster), Whales & Dolphins (HarperCollins) and Insect Lives (Wiley). Hoyt has been a Vannevar Bush Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and twice James Thurber Writer in Residence at The Thurber House. Creatures of the Deep, Hoyt s 13th book, began as a sea monster-shark tale . He soon realized that the real untold story lay in the human quest for deep-sea secrets: the predator-prey dramas, odd symbioses, bioluminsecent communication and the origin of life itself in this deep, dark, high-pressure world. The book eventually doubled in length and in cost, with many rare, state-of-the-art photographs. HONORABLE MENTION Fatal North (Signet Books) by Bruce Henderson The Polaris Expedition led by Charles Francis Hall -- the first U.S. attempt to reach the North Pole -- began as President Ulysses S. Grant's bid for international glory after the Civil War. It ended in a struggle for survival on the polar ice, followed by scandalous charges of incompetence, murder, and government cover-up. In Fatal North, Bruce Henderson, backed with extensive archival research, tells the chilling story of what went terribly wrong. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer who has taught at USC School of Journalism, Henderson is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books of nonfiction, including And The Sea Will Tell, a New York Times number one bestseller which was adapted for network television and became a highly-rated miniseries. A longtime ASJA member, he lives in northern California. SERVICE/SELF-HELP/COLLABORATIVE/SPECIALTY Informed Decisions (American Cancer Society) by Dianne Partie Lange, et al. A former registered nurse, Dianne Lange gave up bedpans for keyboards 25 years ago. After working her way up to a position as editor-in-chief of Family Media's now-departed Health, she went freelance and has, among other things, been a contributing editor and columnist for Allure and author of the weekly health news column, Capsules, for the Los Angeles Times. Informed Decisions is her third publishing project with the American Cancer Society. The first edition of Informed Decisions, written with ASJA member Lois Morris, was named one of the best books of 1997 by Publishers Weekly. In 1999, she wrote Women and Cancer along with two American Cancer Society doctors. Then, in 2000, she was asked to update and revise Informed Decisions, which is the version that has won this prize. CHILDREN'S BOOKS Surviving Hitler (HarperCollins) by Andrea Warren Andrea Warren s book, Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps (HarperCollins), tells the true story of a Polish Jewish teenager imprisoned for three years in the concentration camps. It is Warren's fourth book of nonfiction history for young readers. All four have been widely adapted for use in schools and have won many awards, including the Horn Book Award for Orphan Train Rider: One Boy s True Experience. Warren s stories focus on ordinary children caught up in extraordinary experiences. She also writes for magazine and corporate publications. Warren is a previous winner of the ASJA outstanding article award. She is a native of Nebraska and lives in the Kansas City-Lawrence, Kansas, area. BUSINESS/TECHNOLOGY "It's Time for a Clockless Chip" by Claire Tristram; Technology Review, October 2001 Claire Tristram has written for Technology Review, Wired, Red Herring, Fast Company, and Inc. Technology. "A Time For Clockless Chips" is about an arcane area of microprocessor design where researchers have been laborin for 40 years with no one paying any attention to them. Needless to say they were delighted to speak with me, Claire says, and the story practically wrote itself. FIRST PERSON/ESSAY "If This is Madness" by Andrea Cooper; Hope magazine, Spring 2001 Andrea Cooper is a journalist and essayist based in North Carolina. Her recent credits include Newsweek, Reader s Digest, Working Mother, Cosmopolitan, Oxford American, and National Public Radio s All Things Considered . Cooper is a two-time finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition. She also won ASJA s 2001 Outstanding Article Award for First Person articles. Her winning submission this year, If This is Madness, looks at the line between madness and creativity, as expressed by the author s mother, who is mentally ill, and the author s young daughter, who is quite well. Andrea is currently at work on a memoir. SERVICE "The Most Important Discussion You Must Have" by Sally Stich; New Choices, April 2001 Sally Stich is a contributing editor at Woman's Day and a former contributing editor at New Choices. She writes regularly for women's and parenting magazines. Her winning article "The Most Important Discussion You Must Have" (New Choices, April 2001) was inspired by a piece in her local paper about middle-aged children who had no idea what their parents end-of-life wishes were when the aging mother was diagnosed with one debilitating disease and the aging father with a terminal disease. Their painful journey discussing everything from finances to funerals became the springboard from which this story evolved. PROFILE "Roquefort Files" by Florence Williams; Outside, June 2001 Since 1996, Florence Williams has won four ASJA article awards, including two for personal essay. A graduate of the creative writing department at the University of Montana, she writes regularly for Outside, The New Republic, The New York Times and others. This year's winner in the profile category, "The Roquefort Files," was published in Outside. It is a profile of French farmer and activist Jose Bove, who infamously dismantled a McDonalds restaurant in southern France to protest U.S. trade policies and American cultural imperialism. What started out as a story highlighting global environmental policies took an unexpected turn into the European hysteria over Mad Cow and Foot and Mouth Disease, both of which were appearing in France while she was reporting. Needless to say, Florence did not sample a lot of meat products while visiting the continent. She currently lives in one of the cow capitols of the U.S., western Montana. REPORTING ON A SIGNIFICANT TOPIC "Citizen Scientists" by Sara Solovitch; Wired magazine, September 2001 Sara Solovitch began her journalism career in daily newspapers, first as a staff writer for the Buffalo Courier-Express and then for the Philadelphia Inquirer. For nearly six years, she wrote a weekly column for the San Jose Mercury-News on Kid' Health. Her stories have appeared in House Beautiful, Omni, USA Weekend, The Washington Post, Wired, and many other publications. "Citizen Scientists" got its start after Wired editor Amy Linn, an old newspaper buddy of Sara's, read Sara's story about autism in the San Jose Mercury News. Amy asked Sara if the kind of parent advocacy she had described in her story was happening in other childhood diseases. "After maybe 20 minutes on the phone, I realized I had a great story on my hands, one involving dozens of orphan diseases and a sea change in medical research and practice," says Sara. Sara lives with her husband, Richard Scheinin, and three sons in Santa Cruz, California. JUNE ROTH / MEDICAL JOURNALISM "The Lobotomist" by Jack El-Hai; The Washington Post magazine, February 4, 2001 Jack El-Hai has been an ASJA member for seven years. His magazine work -- usually covering medicine, psychology, crime and law, or architecture -- has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post Magazine, American Heritage, and many other publications. He has also published three trade books and is a partner in Civic Corporate Histories, a book writing and design group. "The Lobotomist" kindled one of Jack's current projects, a biography of Walter J. Freeman that will be published by John Wiley & Sons in Fall 2003. The recipient of fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Center for Arts Criticism, he lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two daughters. Bonnnie Remsberg Bonnie Remsberg is a speech/theatre graduate of Northwestern University. She began her freelance writing career right out of college with an article for Modern Bride. In the long career that followed, she wrote for Reader's Digest, Family Circle, Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Esquire, Seventeen, Consumer Reports, and many other magazines. She has authored three books, had many works optioned by Hollywood and written speeches, commercial projects and scripts for film, television and video. For many years, she hosted a talk show on NBC-TV in Chicago, appeared on a morning program and wrote and narrated award-winning documentaries. She is cited in The Art of Writing Non-Fiction (Syracuse University Press) as a modern writer who keeps the public informed in the tradition of Samel Adams, Tom Paine, Ida M. Tarbell and Woodward and Bernstein. Bonnie has taught writing at the University of Chicago, Northwestern s Medill School of Journalism, Columbia College, Stanford, and Indiana University. She has been a member of ASJA since 1963. She won the ASJA Outstanding Article Award in 1984. No award this year.
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