2016 Will Rogers Humanitarian Award
It’s a new year and time once again to search for someone deserving of the Will Rogers Humanitarian Award. This is the 16th year of this honor, which recognizes a writer whose work has positively affected readers’ lives and produced tangible humanitarian benefits.
NSNC’s Will Rogers statuette
This year’s winner will be honored at a special dinner at the Will Rogers Ranch in California as a feature of the 40th annual conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists in Los Angeles. The dinner will be hosted by Jennifer Rogers-Etcheverry, great-granddaughter of the legendary columnist and multimedia figure of the 1920s and early ’30s.
Conference attendees will get a tour of the house where Rogers did much of his writing prior to his untimely death in a plane crash in 1935. They will see the beautiful grounds where he played polo with his Hollywood pals and other famous visitors and dine in surroundings where he practiced the roping skills that launched his career.
Nominations for the award are now being accepted. A PDF of the entry form, with rules, is available for download. The columnists.com website has information about past winners. Entries must be signed and submitted by the writer’s supervisor.
Deadline is April 1, 2016.
Jennifer Rogers-Etcheverry (left), great-granddaughter of Will Rogers, presents the 2015 Humanitarian Award named for him to Marisa Kwiatkowski, June 26 in Indianapolis.
As a member of NSNC you can help choose the recipient of this prestigious award. Any regularly published newspaper columnist, investigative reporter, opinion journalist or feature writer who is not a previous winner is eligible. Writers may not nominate themselves — they must come from editors or community leaders — but they can help assemble the entry materials.
If you know of someone you think might be deserving of this recognition, please send the name and a brief description of qualifying reasons to Robert Haught, program coordinator, at haughtline@gmail.com, and he will follow up on your lead.
The winner is expected to accept the award in person. Along with a desktop statuette, a $500 stipend is given to help defray the cost of attendance at the conference.
The Will Rogers Humanitarian Award, presented at each annual NSNC conference since 2000, is supported by the Will Rogers Writers Foundation, a non-profit corporation formed to encourage and support clear, simple and effective writing, and the Will Rogers Memorial and Museums at Claremore, Oklahoma.
The award presentation dinner on the evening of Friday, June 24, 2016, will be sponsored by the Will Rogers Memorial Foundation in Oklahoma and the Will Rogers Ranch Foundation in California.
