Hurray for Megan Cottrell!

Well deserved: Megan Cottrell has been named a winner of the 2013 Studs Terkel Community Media Award.

"My stories are often about the bizarre conundrums of living in poverty and how services and systems are designed to help people and often end up hurting them or overlapping in ways that don’t help them at all," Cottrell paused, "When they’re meant to give them a leg up."

I've been avidly following Cottrell's work for several years now, after a random search for information on the LeClaire Courts housing project (as background for one of my Marshland stories) lead to her articles at Chicago Now about the now-demolished LeClaire. Her writing is plainspoken and sympathetic to its subjects, and she is truly a credit to the local journalism community.