NATIONALLY KNOWN AUTHOR, JOURNALIST, COLUMNIST and media critic Caryl Rivers has been awarded the Helen Thomas Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Society of Professional Journalists.
Rivers, a professor at Boston University, was a Washington correspondent covering the civil rights movement, the Kennedy presidency, the Vietnam debate and divides over race, class and gender that convulsed the nation, according to an SPJ press release.
Her 14 books, fiction and nonfiction, have been selections of Book of the Month, Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club. She was recently cited as one of the “Feminists Who Changed America: 1963-1975” by the University of Illinois Press.
Rivers' articles have appeared in major American newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Nation, Saturday Review, Ms., Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post and many others. She also blogs for The Huffington Post.
Rivers received a Gannett Freedom Forum journalism grant and a Goldsmith Research Grant from Harvard for her book on gender with Dr. Rosalind Barnett of Brandeis University, “Same Difference.”
She also has written award-winning screenplays based on her journalism, including “The Cheats,” a drama for ABC.
The award — named after longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas — was presented at the 2008 SPJ Convention & National Journalism Conference in Atlanta. *