Katy Reckdahl is one of 31 recipients of the Katrina Media Fellowships, announced Thursday by the Open Society Institute. The grants were created "to promote a national conversation on racism and inequality in America." The recipients will split $950,000; special consideration was given to applicants who were displaced from or residents of the Gulf Region. Reckdahl, a staff writer for Gambit Weekly at the time of the storm, will use her fellowship "to write about the daily life in New Orleans' Tremé and Irish Channel neighborhoods, focusing on people living in poverty and the challenges they face in terms of jobs, housing, health care, and indigent defense."
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When the order to evacuate came, Gambit Weekly staff writer Katy Reckdahl had to decide which would be worse: staying in New Orleans for the storm or delivering her first child in a car on the evacuation route. She stayed. Here is her account of her son's first days at Touro Infirmary and her family's eventual escape from the city.
Cartoonist Ted Rall, whose work appears in several AAN papers, and Katy Reckdahl, a frequent contributor to Gambit Weekly, are among the five winners of the 2002 James Aronson Awards for Social Justice Journalism. The judges say that Rall's "Cartooning with a Conscience" has "increasingly grown irreverent, cutting and iconoclastic, almost at times seeming to eschew humor in favor of mordant portraiture." Reckdahl was recognized for her work on the homeless of New Orleans. "Reckdahl's work challenges the stereotype that the homeless create their own situation because they are criminals, substance abusers or mentally ill," the judges wrote.
Katy Reckdahl wins a 2002 Casey Journalism Center Medal for Distinguished Coverage of Children and Family Issues. Her award in the non-daily newspaper category is for her "full and compelling report on the troubled Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth" that appeared last year in Gambit Weekly, the center's release states. The series won a first-place in the news feature category of the Alternative Newsweekly Awards.
