THE NORA MAGID MENTORSHIP PRIZE is given each year to a senior at the University of Pennsylvania who shows exceptional ability and promise in writing/reporting/editing, and who would benefit most from combined mentorship of Nora's network of former students and their colleagues in traditional and new media. The prize is $5000 to be used however the student chooses for their professional development—including being used as a stipend for post-grad internships that require one. The winner also receives unparalleled access to a constantly growing network of Penn alumni—including Nora's former students and over a decade of Nora Prize-winners—as well as their extensive web of colleagues who can assist in the student’s career. It is open to all seniors at Penn, although preference is given to those who expect to attempt to make careers in some form of media.
The Nora Prize is given in partnership with the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, the Daily Pennsylvanian and the Kelly Writers House.
To make a tax-deductible donation to the prize fund, go to http://www.philafound.org, click on "give now," choose to donate to a "specific fund" and type in "Nora Magid Mentorship Prize."
Visit our Alumni Mentorship Network or read more about Nora Magid.
Nora Prize season begins in late September with an evening at the Kelly Writers House to discuss careers in media with a variety of Penn alums from the Nora board. Consult the KWH calendar for details.
The application deadline is January 29, 2024 at 11:59 p.m. Click
here to submit your application.
Your application should include:
The 21st annual Nora Magid Mentorship Prize has been awarded to Delaney Parks.
Parks is a Penn senior majoring in English, with a concentration in Creative Writing, who has freelanced for Teen Vogue and other publications and interned at the Resolve Philadelphia media inclusion organization. She was most impacted by her summer 2023 experiences as a journalist in Pittsburgh—where she chose to give up an internship at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to instead work at the paper started by its striking employees, the Pittsburgh Union Progress. There she covered breaking news and features, including the trial of the suspect in the Tree of Life shootings, in stories that also ran in Jewish newspapers across the country. (She later wrote about her experience for 34th Street, and her creative writing thesis is a deep dive into the lives of the striking reporters in Pittsburgh.)
Parks was a news reporter at the Daily Pennsylvanian during the challenging period which began with writers joining the newspaper while living at home as 2020/2021 freshman because of COVID-19, and followed through the controversy surrounding coverage of trans Penn swimmer Lia Thomas. Parks was sent to Atlanta by the paper as part of the team covering what was by then a major national story of Thomas’s competition in the NCAA Women's Swimming and Diving National Championships, and either wrote, co-wrote, or edited all the DP’s high-profile coverage. She was then assignments editor in 2022, and switched to 34th Street as a features writer in 2023. Her Street story “The Radio Rebels at Penn” was honored by Associated College Press in the feature story category. She also joined the staff of the new independent student-run magazine The Woodlands, for which she explored her obsession with the Beatles and the “Paul is Dead” controversy in a longform piece based on reporting in Liverpool.
Her work in Pittsburgh was funded by a Real Arts Fellowship from Penn; she has also received a Neiman Scholarship and an Eric Jacobs Scholarship from the DP. Besides her journalistic work, Park has been an invaluable member of the Kelly Writers House staff since her freshman year, serving first remotely and then in-person as a program and design assistant and overseeing many journalistic events there. She has also worked for the non-profit Cosmic Writers as a writing instructor and mentor for middle-school and high-school kids in Philadelphia.
Parks grew up in Fairfax, Virginia and graduated from Robinson Secondary School. She learned journalism skills as a first-semester general assignment reporter at the DP, working remotely from her childhood bedroom before coming to campus in 2021 and becoming first the academics and faculty affairs beat reporter and later a deputy editor.
Parks has the drive and infectious energy, the reporting and writing skills, and the commitment to team-building and mentorship that Nora Magid so admired in Penn nonfiction writers. She was recommended to the Nora Prize committee by Anthony DeCurtis, senior lecturer in the creative writing department.
The other finalists for the Nora Prize this year were Mira Sydow (recommended by Jay Kirk) Walden Green (recommended by Gabrielle Hamilton), Kira Wang (recommended by Mark Meredith) and Emi Tuyetnhi Tran (recommended by Peter Tarr.)
The 20th annual Nora Magid Mentorship Prize has been awarded to Pia Singh.
Singh is a Penn Senior majoring in Communications with a minor in Political Science, who has worked at CNBC.com, the Wall Street Journal and Philadelphia Magazine. At Penn, she worked her way up at the Daily Pennsylvanian to become, last year, the paper’s Executive Editor and Senior Reporter during a challenging period in campus news coverage.
Singh is best known as co-author of one of the paper’s biggest and most resonant investigative projects in recent memory—an in-depth examination of toxic workplace accusations at Penn’s world-famous genetics lab under the leadership of controversial researcher Dr. James Wilson, and then a major follow-up into an alleged university cover-up of the accusations. This investigation triggered national headlines, and a follow-up investigation by STATnews.
Singh grew up in suburban Philadelphia and graduated from Episcopal Academy in Newtown Square. She came to Penn as a fine arts major—she is an accomplished fine artist and videographer—and originally joined the DP as a general assignment reporter and illustrator. (She also worked as a video director at the campus fashion magazine The WALK). But later she became a DP beat reporter, including on-the-ground coverage of the 2020 New Hampshire primaries, and went on to become deputy news editor and then News Editor, writing over 100 stories for the paper (including a remarkable narrative history of the fight for racial justice at Penn.) In January of 2021 she began an internship at Philadelphia Magazine, followed by a summer digital news internship at the CNBC.com Embeds Desk, where she covered finance, technology crypto and real estate. The next summer she was at the Wall Street Journal as a markets reporting intern, covering market trends, stocks and crypto for the paper and the Live Markets Blog, and was featured on the WSJ podcasts. After finishing her year as Executive Editor of the DP, she has returned to CNBC.com as an intern on the Markets Desk, and also serves as a research associate at Penn’s Computational Social Science Lab.
Singh has the intelligence, the reporting, writing and management skills, the entrepreneurial instinct, and the commitment to team-building and mentorship that Nora Magid so admired in Penn nonfiction writers. She was recommended to the Nora Prize committee by Dr. Julia Bloch, Director of the Creative Writing Program at Penn.
The other finalists for the Nora Prize this year were Meg Gladieux and Laila Shadid (both recommended by Jay Kirk), Bebe Hodges (recommended by Avery Rome) and Emily White (recommended by Murali Balaji.)
The 19th annual Nora Magid Mentorship Prize has been awarded to Beatrice Forman and Alan Jinich.
Forman is a Penn Senior majoring in Communications and Political Science, who has worked as a multimedia journalist for Philadelphia Magazine, Resolve Philly, Vox.com, Smerconish.com and Billy Penn, the hyper-local online news service of WHYY in Philadelphia. At Penn, she was also editor-in-chief of 34th Street Magazine, and the chair of the Daily Pennsylvanian Diversity Committee; she also worked at the Pennsylvania Gazette. While finishing school this semester she is already at her new full-time job as Deputy Editor of Billy Penn, where she focuses on community and solutions journalism.
Jinich is a Penn Senior majoring in Neuroscience and English, who worked in a variety of labs as well as in several editorial settings, as writer, photographer and designer at Penn Appetit and as a production assistant and photographer for the James Beard-award-winning PBS show “Pati’s Mexican Table.” In 2021, he and a classmate took a leave from Penn to spend six months driving cross-country, interviewing more than 80 young adults in cities large and small, and creating the fascinating online Generation Pandemic Project, a portion of which was recently published in the Washington Post, and featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer and on NPR’s Radio Times and Smart Talk.
The 18th annual Nora Magid Mentorship Prize has been awarded to Isabella Simonetti.
A Penn senior, majoring in English with a concentration in creative writing and a minor in journalistic writing, Simonetti has been an intern at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Vox.com, the New York Post and Philadelphia Magazine, besides her four years at the Daily Pennsylvanian, where she just finished up as president of Daily Pennsylvanian Inc, running the entire paper during the most challenging year in recent university and journalistic history. Beginning in June, she will be a news intern at Bloomberg News in New York.
Simonetti grew up in New York City, where she attended the new independent school Avenues: The World School; she co-founded the school’s student newspaper and served as editor-in-chief for three years. As a high school student, she was also an intern on the award-winning HBO documentary Class Divide—about gentrification in her neighborhood of Chelsea--in which she appeared.
During her freshman year at Penn, Simonetti was an award-winning opinion columnist, writing about everything from sex work to economic barriers to Greek life. She then ran the opinion team as a sophomore, and also began writing features for 34th Street; her piece on antidepressant use won the DP’s Michael Silver Award for best writing. That summer she worked at the New York Post as an intern on the Sunday team, and after returning to school, edited and did reporting, including a piece about the college admissions scandal and an op-ed on the scandal that won honorable mention from Associated College Press.
Just months before the pandemic, Simonetti was elected president of the Daily Pennsylvanian, which meant she had to oversee not only coverage of the health emergency, but of the 2020 presidential election and the Black Lives Matter protests—which led to new diversity training. While running the paper she also did internships at Vox.com over the summer of 2020 (where she covered politics and business, including a piece about how the coronavirus affected small businesses on campus), and then the Inquirer (where she was a features intern covering, among other things, survivors of abuse by priests.) She was also a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship.
Simonetti has the drive, the breadth of skills and interests, and the commitment to helping others improve journalistically that Nora Magid so admired in young nonfiction writers. She was recommended to the Nora Magid Prize committee by Buzz Bissinger, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author who teaches Advanced Nonfiction Writing--the course created by Nora in the late 1970s--in Penn’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.
The other finalists for the Nora Prize this year were Julie Coleman (nominated by Dick Polman), Tamsyn Brann (nominated by Jamie-Lee Josselyn), and Kelly Liu (nominated by Paul Hendrickson.)
The 17th annual Nora Magid Mentorship Prize has been awarded to Madeleine Ngo.
A Penn senior, majoring in English with a minor in Economics, Maddie Ngo has been a reporting intern at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Dallas Morning News and Vox.com, besides her stellar work as an editor and reporter at the Daily Pennsylvanian. Beginning in June, she will be a reporter/intern for the Wall Street Journal’s Washington, DC bureau, covering Congress and the 2020 election.
Ngo grew up in Gulf Breeze, Florida—near where her grandparents settled after leaving South Vietnam during the war. She graduated from Gulf Breeze High School, and then attended the University of Florida for a year (also working as a staff writer at local Fine Print Magazine), before transferring to Penn. She began at the DP as the gender and diversity beat reporter—covering, among other things, the controversy surrounding law school professor Amy Wax’s comments about African American students--and went on to become senior news editor, managing a staff of more than fifty reporters and editors covering Penn and Philadelphia. In that role, she also led a team that investigated President Trump’s time at Penn.
After her first year at Penn, she was a summer intern at Vox.com, on the foreign and national security desk in Washington. After her second year, she worked in the Washington bureau of the Dallas Morning News, covering Capitol Hill as well as the Beto O’Rourke campaign. Last fall she was an intern at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where she covered breaking news.
Ngo has the ambition and determination, as well as the inspiring belief in the power of journalism, that Nora Magid so admired in young nonfiction writers. She was recommended to the Nora Magid Prize committee by Avery Rome, the longtime Inquirer editor now teaching journalism and magazine writing in Penn’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.
The other finalists for the Nora Prize this year were Annabelle Williams (nominated by Buzz Bissinger), Sophie Burkholder (nominated by Rome), Caroline Curran (nominated by Bissinger) and Katrina Janco (nominated by Dwayne Booth).
The 16th annual Nora Magid Mentorship Prize has been awarded to Rebecca Tan.
A Penn senior, majoring in English/Creative Writing with minors in History and Fine Arts, Tan is currently a freelance reporter for the Washington Post, and a reporter at the Daily Pennsylvanian. Beginning in June, she will be a reporter/intern for the Washington Post metro desk.
Tan is the first international student to win the Nora Prize, and is a native speaker of English and Mandarin Chinese. She grew up in Singapore, where her high school did not have a newspaper so she worked for the nation’s main newspaper, The Straits Times, as a lifestyle and arts reporter. But most of her journalistic training came at the Daily Pennsylvanian, where she started as a second-semester freshman as a general assignment reporter. She then worked as a beat reporter covering under-represented communities, exploring gender and diversity issues, and the challenges of First Generation Low Income (FGLI) students, and students with mental illness.
After the election of Donald Trump, she was the senior reporter of the enterprise team exploring Trump’s time at Penn (including the viral story Was Trump really a top student at Wharton? His classmates say not so much.)
She went on to become a senior news editor of the DP and then executive editor. She also oversaw a specialized investigative unit covering faculty sexual misconduct, mistreatment of students in the Athletic department, allegations of University negligence in association to student deaths, and violent crime on campus.
Tan was the DP reporter of the year in 2016, and that year also won a DP Donald Neiman Scholarship which paid for her to work that summer at Vox.com, where she covered international stories including the challenges of migrant workers from Southeast Asia in the Middle East. Under her leadership, the DP won Pacemaker Awards from the National Scholastic Press Association in 2017 and 2018.
In the summer of 2018, Tan worked as an intern at the Washington Post, assigned to the foreign desk. Among the forty stories she did that summer were explorations of the Ethiopian community in DC and the breakthrough of Iranian women finally being allowed to watch the World Cup in the same stadium as men. She has done freelance assignments for the Post since then, and the paper has already hired her as a paid intern on the Metro desk when she graduates. Her hope is to become a full reporter and one day to be sent abroad as a foreign correspondent—ideally to Southeast Asia to be closer to her family there.
Tan was recommended to the Nora Magid Prize committee by Dick Polman, the WHYY national political columnist and “Writer in Residence” in Penn’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.
The other finalists for the Nora Prize this year were Sharon Christner, Naomi Elegant (both nominated by Buzz Bissinger), Sabrina Qiao (nominated by Paul Hendrickson), and Cole Jacobsen (nominated by Jamie-Lee Josselyn.)
The 15th annual Nora Magid Mentorship Prize has been awarded to Dani Blum and Jacob Gardenswartz. This is only the second time the prize has had co-winners, but these two candidates were both exceptional in completely different ways—except they were both amazing nonfiction talents—so we honor them both.
Blum is a Penn senior, majoring in English with a minor in Political Science; she is currently an editorial assistant at the Pennsylvania Gazette and has previously interned at the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Observer, and written for the Daily Beast and Philadelphia Magazine; at Penn she served as managing editor of 34th Street magazine and, previously, a columnist and video producer at the Daily Pennsylvanian. Her journalistic work has focused on university party culture and substance abuse, and sexism and sexual violence on campus, including an entire issue of 34th Street featuring first-person accounts of sexual violence. She is from Ridgefield, CT, and was recommended for the Nora Prize by advanced non-fiction instructor Buzz Bissinger.
Gardenswartz is a Penn senior majoring in Communications and Public Service; he is simultaneously finishing a Master’s degree in Public Administration (MPA) Candidate, Fels Institute of Government. He currently co-hosts the Daily Pennsylvanian podcast “Quite Frankly,” and has interned at Vox at the Policy and Politics Desk for Ezra Klein; at NBC News and MSNBC as an assistant news and polling analyst and an intern at “Meet the Press”; written for the Times of San Diego and the San Diego Union Tribune; and researched at WHYY for columnist Dick Polman; he has also been a summer research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a teaching assistant at the Annenberg School for Bloomberg columnist Al Hunt. His print and broadcast journalistic work has focused on national politics, election coverage and data analysis. He is from San Diego and was recommended for the Nora Prize by Annenberg professor David Eisenhower.
The other finalists for the Nora Prize this year were Rebecca Heilweil, recommended by Anthony DeCurtis, Dan Spinelli, recommended by Dick Polman, and Chloe Shakin, recommended by Buzz Bissinger.
A Penn senior, majoring in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, Sadurni is currently an intern at the Philadelphia Inquirer and was previously a senior reporter at the Daily Pennsylvanian, and an intern at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington. This summer he will be at the New York Times as a James Reston Reporting Fellow.
Ferré Sadurni has done exceptional and enterprising work at the DP, where he covered the presidential campaign (recently breaking a national story uncovering Donald Trump’s charitable giving to Penn), as well as student debt, immigration, and other issues; he has also done breaking news reporting, in-depth feature writing and data journalism at the Inquirer, covering everything from how new immigration laws affect foreign students, to the rise in young adults not leaving home after college, to the growth of the Puerto Rican community in Camden, to breaking news about accidental deaths. Because he is fluent in Spanish, he has also worked as an interpreter for other Inquirer colleagues on their stories.
The judges were especially impressed with Ferré Sadurni’s boundless curiosity and pursuit of stories, characters, data and context; his fluid writing style; his understanding of the past and future of the media; and his infectious collegiality. These are all qualities Nora Magid valued in non-fiction writers and editors, and encouraged through her own decades of mentorship.
Ferré Sadurni grew up in a journalistic family in Puerto Rico, where his father is editor-in-chief of the island’s largest daily, El Nuevo Dia, and several other family members work on the publishing side. He worked summers in high school on the printing press, in the archives, in the marketing department and on the sports desk. He graduated from Colegio San Ignacio de Loyola in San Juan in 2013 and came to Penn to study politics. He was an intern at the U.S. House of Representatives during the summer of his freshman year, and an editor at the Penn Political Review. But at the end of his sophomore year, after taking a profile writing class, he signed up to work on the summer edition of the DP. And after a fall semester abroad in Paris studying politics, he began gravitating back to journalism, through courses and independent studies in Penn’s new Journalism Minor.
Ferré Sadurni was recommended to the Nora Magid Prize committee by Robert Strauss, the veteran Philadelphia reporter and author who teaches in Penn’s Creative Writing Program.
The other finalists for the Nora Prize this year were David Murrell, recommended by Dick Polman; Laine Higgins, recommended by Jay Kirk, Casey Quackenbush, recommended by Buzz Bissinger; and Sarah Wilson recommended by Paul Hendrickson.
The 13th annual Nora Magid Mentorship Prize has been awarded to Jill Castellano.
A Penn senior, double majoring in Psychology and Criminology, Castellano is currently interning at the Philadelphia Inquirer, after completing a year as editor-in-chief of the Daily Pennsylvanian. She has also been an intern at Forbes (where she covered the impact of sexual assault cases on university budgets), the New York Daily News (where her story on abuses at a Brooklyn homeless shelter prompted a DHS investigation), and Philadelphia Weekly. She has already been hired for this summer for the prestigious new data journalism fellowship from the Dow Jones News Fund and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE).
Castellano has also been an award-winning writer and editor at the Daily Pennsylvanian her entire four years at Penn, best known for her enterprise reporting on financial aid and Penn’s legal battles, and her extensive pieces on mental health following a string of student suicides. In 2015, her work won first place in the Religion Newswriters Association competition for Excellence in Student Religion Reporting, and the year before was honored by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association with a first place award for Breaking News for Digital Media.
The judges were especially impressed with Castellano’s bold reporting and writing, her work and ambition as a writer and editor in multimedia journalism and data reporting, and her thoughtful efforts to restructure the editorial leadership of the Daily Pennsylvanian, 34th Street and the Under the Button blog.
A native of Ardsley, New York, Castellano is a graduate of Ardsley High School. Besides her journalistic work at Penn, she spent several years as a research assistant at Penn’s Jerry Lee Center for Criminology, where she assisted in the creation of a coding scheme to analyze recent psychological data on aggressive children, and assisted in data collection and coding for recently-conducted psychological and biological experiments related to the biological basis of criminal behavior.
She clearly has the relentless curiosity and bold ambition that Nora Magid so valued in non-fiction writers and editors.
Castellano was recommended to the Nora Magid Prize committee by Dick Polman, Writer in Residence at Penn’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.
The other finalist for the award was Nina Friend, who was recommended by professor Beth Kephart. Our thanks to all the Penn seniors who applied for the award this year, to the Penn faculty who wrote recommendations, and to everyone who has generously supported the prize fund.
The 12th annual Nora Magid Mentorship Prize has been awarded to Sarah Smith.
A Penn senior, dual majoring in English/Creative Writing and Political Science, Smith is currently interning at the Philadelphia Inquirer for a second time—during her first internship, starting before her junior year, she broke a front-page story about police misconduct. Last summer she was a reporting intern at POLITICO in Washington.
Smith has also been an award-winning writer and editor at the Daily Pennsylvanian her entire four years at Penn, best known for her enterprise reporting on dangerous wait times and other deficiencies in Penn’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) and her coverage of campus sexual assault. She has been named Reporter of the Year twice at the DP, and also won the Michael Silver Award for the best written story of the year for a piece on a transgender Penn student who does sex work.
The judges were especially impressed with Smith’s fearless and driven investigative reporting both on-campus and on the streets of Philadelphia—with ambitious investigative projects including multiple interviews of professional and lay sources, and combing through large amounts of raw university and city data—and her strong, sensitive writing.
A native of Marblehead, MA, Smith is a graduate of Marblehead High School and worked in the summer before college in the office of Massachusetts State Representative Lori Ehrlich; she has also worked summers at Marblehead Patch news service and The Jewish Advocate in Boston. She clearly has the dogged determination and stylistic sensitivity that that Nora Magid so valued in non-fiction writers and editors.
Smith was recommended to the Nora Magid Prize committee by Dick Polman, Writer in Residence at Penn’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.
The other finalists for the award were Katelyn Behrman, recommended by Anthony DeCurtis, and Ian Wenik, also recommended by Polman. Our thanks to all the Penn seniors who applied for the award this year, to the Penn faculty who wrote recommendations, and to everyone who has generously supported the prize fund.
The 11th annual Nora Magid Mentorship Prize has been awarded to Seth Zweifler.
A Penn senior studying Communication and Public Service in the Annenberg School, Zweifler is currently interning at the Philadelphia Inquirer and has been an intern at the Chronicle of Higher Education--where, last summer, he broke what became a national front page story concerning sexual harassment charges against star University of Miami philosophy professor Colin McGinn--and the Student Press Law Center (SPLC).
He has also been an award-winning reporter and editor at the Daily Pennsylvanian during his entire time at Penn, and is the only student journalist to ever win the Page One Award for best hard news/investigative reporting (for continuing coverage of a wrongful death lawsuit against a fraternity) and the Michael A. Silver Award for best writing (for a moving piece on a blind graduate student of music.)
The judges were especially impressed with his passionate, in-depth reporting and strong, evocative writing whether on deadline for breaking news or in longer stories--including a powerful feature on a 54-year-old med school professor's 13-year struggle with ALS.
A native of Paoli, PA and a graduate of Conestoga High School, Seth is a dogged, insightful reporter and writer, equally comfortable with breaking news and newspaper and magazine-style feature writing. He clearly has the passion, professionalism, ambition and depth that Nora Magid so valued in non-fiction writers and editors.
Zweifler was recommended to the Nora Magid Prize committee by Carlin Romano, Visiting Professor at the Annenberg School. The other finalists for the award were Naomi Shavin, Zoe Kirsch, Sam Brodey and Shaj Mathew, who were recommended by Paul Hendrickson, Al Filreis, Anthony Decurtis and Stephen Metcalf respectively.
The 10th annual Nora Magid Mentorship Prize has been awarded to Joe Pinsker.
A Penn senior studying English, Joe Pinsker has been an intern and researcher for Rolling Stone magazine and the managing editor of 34th Street, the weekly magazine of Daily Pennsylvanian. He began his writing career in high school as the co-author of a book about the experience of freshman year, "Been There, Survived That," and started writing for 34th Street when he arrived at Penn--eventually becoming music editor and then managing editor.
The judges were especially impressed with his arts and music writing, for Street and for his advanced non-fiction classes, including a haunting piece about the photojournalism of Dorothea Lange and the subject of her famous photo "Migrant Mother" in the 1930s. He was also highly recommended by the editors he worked for at Rolling Stone, during and after his RealArts at Penn internship there.
A native of San Carlos, CA in suburban San Francisco and a graduate of the Menlo School, Joe is a smart, insightful writer and a confident and generous editor and colleague—both at Street and in his non-fiction writing classes. He clearly has the passion, professionalism, curiosity and depth that Nora Magid so valued in non-fiction writers and editors.(Nora also would have been delighted by the fact that Joe once worked as a child hand model for a board game company.) While his mentorship will begin immediately, he will receive his award at a reception in New York which is being organized for March.
Pinsker was recommended to the Nora Magid Prize committee by Anthony DeCurtis. The other finalists for the award were Michael Morse, Elizabeth Horkley, Maanvi Singh and Mike Wisniewski. Our thanks to all the Penn seniors who applied for the award this year, to the Penn faculty who wrote recommendations, and to everyone who has generously supported the prize fund.
The Nora Magid Mentorship Prize for 2012 has been awarded to Jessica Goodman.
A Penn senior studying Creative Writing, with a minor in Gender, Culture and Society, Jessica Goodman has been an intern and researcher for Rolling Stone magazine and the editor-in-chief of 34th Street magazine and its blog, Under The Button. She began in journalism at Penn as a freshman copy editor at Street and later food editor, and she spent a summer at Estee Lauder working on a breast cancer awareness campaign. Then, as a junior, she won the prestigious RealArts@PENN internship—allowing her to work at Rolling Stone, and also do research for author and Inside Edition TV producer Charles Lachman. As editor of Street, she managed a staff of 30 and wrote features, including “There’s Something About Molly,” an excellent in-depth look at the use of the drug MDMA among college students.
A native of Muttontown, NY on Long Island and a graduate of Friends Academy in Locust Valley, Jessica is a dogged reporter, a stylish writer and a smart, intuitive and generous editor and colleague—both at Street and in her non-fiction writing classes. She clearly has the passion, professionalism and curiosity that Nora Magid so valued in non-fiction writers and editors. While her mentorship will begin immediately, she will receive her award at a reception in New York which is being organized for March.
Goodman was recommended to the Nora Magid Prize committee by Anthony DeCurtis. The other finalists for the award were Katie Sanders, Brian Kotloff and Samantha Sharf. Our thanks to all the Penn seniors who applied for the award this year, to the Penn faculty who wrote recommendations, and to everyone who has generously supported the prize fund.
The Nora Magid Mentorship Prize for 2011 has been awarded to Matt Flegenheimer A Penn senior studying Economics, History and Journalistic Writing, Matt Flegenheimer has been a regular contributor to the The Philadelphia Inquirer for the past 18 months, after completing internships on both the features desk and, more recently, the city desk (where he has covered everything from the tragic duckboat accident to a website that allows students to gamble on their own grades.)
He began his journalistic career as a Daily Pennsylvanian sportswriter and editor, winning Columbia Scholastic Press Association Gold Circle Awards for sports features and commentary in 2009 and 2010, but now writes on a wide variety of subjects. He has contributed to the New York Times travel section and Obit Magazine (where he wrote a powerful piece about his grandfather's descent into dementia); he has written a column for the online newspaper The Faster Times; and recently won the Gibson Peacock Prize for Creative Non-Fiction by a Penn undergrad (for his thoughtful and revealing piece on his family and horse racing).
A native of New York City and a graduate of Friends Seminary in Manhattan, Flegenheimer is a bright, bold reporter and a provocative, stylistically ambidextrous writer, equally comfortable covering breaking news in print and online, and writing longer newspaper and magazine pieces. He clearly has the passion, curiosity and guts that Nora Magid so valued in non-fiction writers.
Flegenheimer was recommended to the Nora Magid Prize committee by Dick Polman, writer-in-residence. The other finalists for the award were Jessica Goldstein, Maggie McGrath and Sean Whiteman.
Our thanks to all the Penn seniors who applied for the award this year, to the Penn faculty who wrote recommendations, and to everyone who has generously supported the prize fund.
The Nora Magid Mentorship Prize for 2010 has been awarded to Jamie France.
A Penn senior studying English and Creative Writing, Jamie France is currently interning at The New Yorker, and commuting to campus to finish her last course before graduation. She has previously interned at Conde Nast's Brides magazine and, during a year abroad, was a contributing editor at the Australian edition of Rolling Stone. On campus, she has been head features writer for the Penn fashion magazine The Walk and a tutor for the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.
A native of Plantation, Florida, and a graduate of Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale, France is a smart, instinctive reporter and a thoughtful, ambitious writer, equally comfortable in short or long-form newspaper and magazine journalism. She clearly has the passion, curiosity and bravery that Nora Magid so valued in non-fiction writers.
France was recommended to the Nora Magid Prize committee by Dick Polman, writer-in-residence. The other finalists for the award were Julia Rubin, Bob Ma and Morgan Roper.
Our thanks to all the Penn seniors who applied for the award this year, to the Penn faculty who wrote recommendations, and to everyone who has generously supported the prize fund.
The Nora Magid Mentorship Prize for 2009 has been awarded to Gabriel Oppenheim.
A Penn senior studying English and Creative Writing, Gabe Oppenheim spent last summer as an intern at the Style section of the Washington Post, where he published over a dozen feature pieces (on rhinoceroses, phlebotomists, baseball fans, filmmakers and even urologists). He has also been an intern at HBO in its documentary film unit, and at Esquire magazine. At Penn he has been an award-winning columnist at the Daily Pennsylvanian--recipient of three Columbia Scholastic Press Association Gold Circle Awards and the DP Columnist of the Year prize--and a writer for 34th Street. Winner of the 2007 Creative Nonfiction Prize from Penn's Creative Writing Program, Oppenheim has been researching and writing a book on boxing in Philadelphia, "Only the Defeat is Permanent," as an independent study for the past two years.
A native of Scarsdale, NY, and a graduate of The Ramaz School, Oppenheim is a strong, creative reporter and an elegant writer, equally adept at creative nonfiction, political commentary, arts reviewing and humor. He has also written some award-winning short fiction, and has done quite a bit of broadcast work, as studio anchor for the radio broadcasts of Penn Quaker basketball games on WXPN and a morning anchor on the student radio station WQHS. He clearly has the bold personality, passion and infectious curiosity that Nora Magid so valued in non-fiction writers.
Oppenheim was recommended to the Nora Magid Prize committee by Paul Hendrickson, professor of English. The other finalists for the award were Zoe Tillman, Tali Yahalom, Julie Steinberg and Sarah Cantin.
The Nora Magid Mentorship Prize for 2008 has been awarded to Jessica Sidman.
A Penn senior studying English and an award-winning student journalist, Jessica Sidman has been an intern at USA Today and The Colorado Springs Gazette, and has already been hired by the Dallas Morning News for a three-month enterprise internship this summer. A prolific news and feature writer at the Daily Pennsylvanian, and an editor for 34th Street magazine, she is known for her wide range of talents in reporting and writing--her clip file teeming with everything from her incisive coverage of the murder trials of Wharton undergrad Irina Malinovskaya to her hilarious recent DP front page story "Red, blue—and yellow" about the 20-year history of students urinating on the campus statue of Ben Franklin, "Ben on the Bench." Her haunting 34th Street cover story about famed Philadelphia mural painter David McShane and how the anonymous subject of one of his murals found him after the mural had been destroyed, won the DP Alumni Association's Michael Silver Award, for the single best piece of writing in the paper.
A native of Colorado Springs, Colorado, and a graduate of William J. Palmer High School, Sidman was recommended to the Nora Magid Prize committee by Anthony DeCurtis, Lecturer, Creative Writing, at Penn's English Department, and longtime Rolling Stone, contributing editor. She clearly has the passion, heart, seemingly limitless curiosity and sense of journalistic camaraderie that Nora Magid so valued in non-fiction writers.
The Nora Magid Mentorship Prize for 2007 has been awarded to Jason Schwartz.
A Penn senior studying Creative Writing, History and Political Science, Jason Schwartz has been a freelance reporter for the Boston Globe and an editorial intern at Boston magazine and New England Cable News, as well as one of the most prolific writers at the Daily Pennsylvanian and 34th Street, with some 130 newspaper and magazine stories published over three years. He is best known for breaking the national story of the free speech debate at Penn over photos taken of a couple having sex through the window of their high-rise dorm room in the fall of 2005; in the fall of 2006 the DP sent Schwartz to New Orleans to report and write a five-part series on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. His most recent 34th Street cover story penetrated the world of Philadelphia's notorious "Madden underground," where video-game obsessed "ballers" compete for cash prizes (and wager thousands on the side) over the outcomes of Madden Football games.
A native of Newton, MA and a graduate of the Noble and Greenough School, Schwartz is a driven reporter and an engaging writer, equally adept at covering hard news on deadline, writing newspaper features and writing magazine stories. His combined interest in journalism and history bring his work a depth and texture rarely found in student writing, and he has a great eye for telling detail. He has written on subjects as diverse as the former Penn Ph.D. student who became a high-ranking official in Hamas, to Confederate War revisionists in the north, to how the murder of a Penn graduate student in 1958 forever changed the relationship between the University and the city. He clearly has the passion, heart, diversity of curiosity and dry wit that Nora Magid so valued in non-fiction writers.
Schwartz was recommended to the Nora Magid Prize committee by Dick Polman, Journalism Instructor and Writer in Residence at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. The other finalists for the award were Benjamin Crair and Louise McCready.
The Nora Magid Mentorship Prize for 2006 has been awarded to Melody Joy Kramer.
A Penn senior studying Creative Writing and the History and Sociology of Science, Kramer has been an intern at Esquire magazine (where she has also done some freelance writing), and was an award-winning columnist for the Daily Pennsylvanian. Her DP columns won the Columbia Gold Circle prize for best college column in the country, and she was also a finalist for the National Society of Newspaper Columnists college columnist of the year prize.
Kramer is a clever, engaging writer of both newspaper columns and magazine features, and has a rare ability to bring her strong voice and reporting skills to subjects serious and comic, public and personal. She clearly has the passion, heart and humor that Nora Magid so valued in non-fiction writers. A Cherry Hill native and graduate of Cherry Hill High School East, Kramer transferred to Penn from the University of Rochester, but immediately made up for lost time by getting involved in the DP, the Penn Band (where she plays trumpet and trombone), and college humor writing (she was editor of Punch Bowl magazine and wrote for collegehumor.com). She also served as a Peer Writing Tutor at the Center for Contemporary Writing and a research assistant at the Annenberg Rare Books Library.
The Nora Magid Mentorship Prize for 2005 has been awarded to Ashley Parker.
A Penn senior majoring in English and Communications, and a Benjamin Franklin Scholar, Parker has done internships at the New York Sun and the Gaithersburg Gazette, and has served as features editor and writer at both 34th Street and the Daily Pennsylvanian. She is a smart, thoughtful writer of both newspaper and magazine stories, and brings the passion and heart to non-fiction that Nora Magid so valued. A Bethesda native and graduate of Walt Whitman High School, Parker spent part of her junior year at La Universidad de Sevilla in Spain and is near-fluent in Spanish. She is also a point guard in Club Basketball.
Parker was recommended by Paul Hendrickson, professor of English
The 2004 Nora Magid Mentorship Prize has been awarded to Dan Kaplan and Rebecca Rosner.
Dan Kaplan, a history major, former DP columnist and an editor at 34th Street, is our pure writer. He is a compelling, smart and sometimes wild wordsmith who is already writing at a professional (if offbeat) level, and we will encourage him in a magazine/alt-weekly writing track.
Rebecca Rosner, a creative prose major, DP columnist and intern at Philadelphia Weekly and Philadelphia Style, is a fine emotional writer but also has a lot of experience doing the kind of service journalism that should help her get a job at a more mainstream publication in New York or Philadelphia. She wrote what the judges considered to be the single best article submitted with the applications--a powerfully spare piece about the illness and recent death of her father.
Both were recommended by Paul Hendrickson, professor of English