By Storer Rowley
The Chicago Headline Club and Foundation announced Friday that DePaul University junior Grace Logan has been named the recipient of the 2026 Les Brownlee Memorial Scholarship, a $5,000 annual award supporting emerging journalists in Chicago and Illinois.
The Foundation received applications from student journalists attending colleges and universities across Illinois. Logan was selected by the Foundation board after a competitive review process that highlighted strong reporting, community engagement and a commitment to public-service journalism.
Logan, 21, is finishing her junior year at DePaul University in Chicago, where she serves as multimedia editor of The DePaulia student newspaper. She also freelances and recently worked as an audience intern for Chicago Public Media, where her reporting has appeared on WBEZ and in the Chicago Sun-Times. Over the past year, she contributed to WBEZ’s Prisoncast! project, helping manage social media and correspondence connected to the program serving incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and their families.
The Shawnee, Kansas, native began pursuing journalism in high school. In 2023, she earned first-place honors from the National High School Journalism Convention and the National Scholastic Press Association for a feature story about a football coach who received a kidney transplant from a student’s parent.
“I was very proud and excited to earn this scholarship, but it also provided a lot of relief that I haven’t felt in a long time—college puts a lot of financial strain on the family,” Logan said.
Logan said she hopes to build a journalism career focused on inequity, incarceration, immigration and communities whose stories are often overlooked.
The scholarship will help Logan attend Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City this summer as she works toward becoming fluent in Spanish.
Foundation President Molly McDonough said Logan distinguished herself through both her reporting experience and her commitment to community-centered journalism.
“Grace represents the kind of thoughtful, compassionate journalism the Les Brownlee Memorial Scholarship was created to support,” McDonough said. “Her work already reflects a strong commitment to telling stories that are too often overlooked, and we’re excited to support her continued growth as a journalist.”
Logan said her experiences growing up shaped her interest in covering incarceration, addiction and the ways people are represented in the media.
“Not to sound too dramatic,” Logan said, “but I felt like journalism really saved my life in a way, considering the circumstances that I grew up with—with my dad being formerly incarcerated and a tumultuous upbringing around that.”
She said those experiences motivated her to pursue reporting that gives a voice to people often ignored or misunderstood.
“So, witnessing my dad go through that, it really pushed me to want to be doing something that told those stories—I wanted people to look for the stories that no one was looking for or telling, the story of incarcerated people or addiction or something not frequently done in news media.”
That mission has already shaped her work with Prisoncast!, where she helped facilitate conversations between incarcerated people and audiences outside prison walls.
“My area has been this question: ‘What would you want people on the outside to know about you or your life on the inside?’—and I have done this twice a week post that talks about what prisoners want,” Logan said.
In addition to her work on incarceration issues, Logan has written for the Chicago Sun-Times, produced reporting for WBEZ’s Curious City and covered arts and culture stories for The DePaulia.
“All I know is that I will do my best to help those in need,” Logan said.
Scholarship Committee Chair Storer Rowley thanked faculty advisers, journalism educators and student media leaders across Illinois for encouraging students to apply each year.
The Les Brownlee Memorial Scholarship honors Les Brownlee, the first Black member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the first Black president of the Chicago Headline Club. Brownlee died in 2005.
Applications for the 2027 scholarship cycle will open in February 2027.
The Chicago Headline Club Foundation is committed to supporting the next generation of journalists through scholarships, training and professional development opportunities. Those interested in helping sustain programs like the Les Brownlee Memorial Scholarship can support the Foundation’s work through donations that invest in the future of ethical, community-centered journalism.
Your contributions are also welcome at:
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Chicago, IL 60612