Last issue, we said goodbye and good luck to the talented Jack Brook ’19, former BAM intern, who is spending the summer doing criminal justice reporting for the Marshall Project in NYC before heading to the Miami Herald. We had a hunch Jack would be winning awards, but we didn’t know how soon. In mid-June, the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) announced the results of its 2019 international award program, and BAM earned six nods, including one for Jack’s writing. His stories “I Have A System for That,” “Crossing the Political Divide,” and “A Symphony of Moments” demonstrated “outstanding quality...were fun to read, fascinating, and extremely well written,” the CASE judges said in their comments. Jack, we knew you when.
The CASE award program is the big one for alumni magazines, and this year’s wins—BAM’s first since 2002—included a gold for our redesigned website. The judges liked the “bold illustrations and photography” and the way the site “encourages readers to stay engaged with the content, creating the feeling of reading an interactive magazine in the commercial market.” If you haven’t checked us out since the relaunch of brownalumnimagazine.com this fall, consider taking a look.
CASE also praised the recent redesign of our print magazine for capturing the “essence of Brown.” Stories are “newsworthy and often quirky,” judges said, and “the pacing is just right. The smaller size of the book makes it easy to hold and read.”
Finally, BAM won for illustration (the haunting image accompanying the story “What Would You Do?”) and for two more pieces of writing: “Just the Facts,” about Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler ’81, by Stephanie Grace ’87, and “Woman of Letters,” about philosophy professor Felicia Nimue Ackerman, as told to Tim Murphy ’91. The CASE judges variously used terms such as provocative, brave, clever, relevant, objective, artful, punchy, and fun to describe these stories and their design. They’re all great reads; each, in its own way, addresses the human condition through a distinctly Brown lens. If you haven’t seen them yet, they’re easy to find on the web at brownalumnimagazine.com. We’d love to hear what you think. The judges’ comments are rewarding, but it’s yours that matter most to us.
Of course, the winning stories above are about, and often by, members of the Brown community—themselves provocative, brave, clever, and artful. With that in mind, we’re excited to welcome new interns. Jackson Truesdale ’20, Anita Sheih ’20, and Marisa Chib ’19 have been with us for just a few weeks but have already turned in great work; Joshua Danielson ’20, Peter Goldman ’20, and David Kleinman ’20 continue to do so, for both print and digital channels. We’re lucky to work with Brown’s talented students and to be part of an extended community that, as the CASE judges observed, matters in the world. We look forward to continuing to bring it all to you.
