Created in 2012 to honor longtime Chicago Tribune writer Anne Keegan, this award honors journalists who write stories that capture the “dignity and spirit of the common man.”
This year’s winner of the Anne Keegan Award is Lolly Bowean.
Bowean is being honored for her deeply-reported and beautifully-written stories about life in the city’s African American community.
In her winning entry, she wrote about the ritual of older black women passing their expensive fur coats on to younger women, former residents of the Stateway Gardens public housing complex who, 12 years after the complex was demolished, still gather for reunions, and a 98-year-old woman who ministers to prisoners at Stateville Correctional Center.
In these stories and many others she’s written over the years, Bowean impressed the judges with her eye for detail, her sense of humor and humanity and – in true spirit of the Anne Keegan Award — her ability to capture the dignity and resilience of common men and women.
Congratulations, Lolly!
(via Colleen Mastony, a former Anne Keegan Award-winner)
Here’s Lolly Bowean with her reaction to the honor.