On April 30, the James Beard Foundation announced its 2024 Media Award nominees. For the third year in a row, taco editor José R. Ralat and Texas Monthly have been nominated in the Columns and Newsletters category for José’s Tex-Mexplainer series. According to the organization’s website, “This award recognizes the work of an individual or team/group that demonstrates thought-provoking opinion and a compelling style on food- or drink-related topics.” José’s pieces “Defining ‘Guisado’ Is Just as Messy as the Dish Itself,” “A Head Above: How Barbacoa Paved the Way for Barbecue,” and “Red, White, and Covered in Salsa: How Two Colors Came to Dominate Taquerias” were specifically cited in the nomination. Winners of the 2024 James Beard Media Awards will be announced live in Chicago on June 8.
This is Texas Monthly’s eighth nomination in JBF Media Award history, following José’s 2022 and 2023 wins, Pat Sharpe’s 2006 feature-writing win for “Confessions of a ‘Skinny Bitch,’ ” and additional nods in 2009, 2018, and 2022. TM is once again the only Texas publication nominated this year in any journalism category. The full list of nominations can be viewed here.
Senior editor Dan Solomon’s debut novel, The Fight for Midnight, has been short-listed for the thirty-fourth annual Reading the West Book Awards. These awards honor the best fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and illustrated books set in fourteen Western and Midwestern states or created by authors or artists in those states. Dan’s novel is set during Wendy Davis’s 2013 filibuster of the abortion bill HB 2. The Fight for Midnight is nominated in the Young Adult category, and voting is open to the public. Click here to cast your ballot!
Senior executive editor Mimi Swartz has won the prestigious John P. McGovern Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication, for her enterprising reporting and vivid writing on medical topics over several decades. Her works include the acclaimed 2018 book Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart and two Texas Monthly stories that won National Magazine Awards: “Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives,” in 2013, and “Not What the Doctor Ordered,” in 1996. The American Medical Writers Association, which grants the award, wrote that it “found [Mimi’s] work as a writer and author of a bestselling book to be particularly timely and compelling. This is as true now as it was when [she] spoke to our chapter back in 2005 about [her] Texas Monthly article ‘Till Death Do Us Part,’ about the events that led to breakup of Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine and the Methodist Hospital.”
The McGovern Award was established in 1982 to recognize those who have shown excellence in biomedical communication. It is named for the late Dr. John P. McGovern, founder and director of the McGovern Allergy Clinic, in Houston, and a noted educator, author, and historian.
Finally, senior editor Forrest Wilder was awarded the 2024 Alafair Hammett Media Award by the Association of Texas Professional Educators, in recognition of his August 2023 article “Rural School Districts Are Facing Financial Ruin. Some State Officials Prefer It That Way.” Named for ATPE’s first state president, the award recognizes the creator of an outstanding work of journalism for the work’s coverage of public-education issues. The award will be presented to Forrest at ATPE’s annual conference in Dallas on July 10.
