Youth Communication: Who We Are - Awards & Acheivments

Awards & Recognition

Educational Publishing Awards (magazines and books)
National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award
Journalism Awards
MacArthur Fellowships & Misc. Awards

Youth Communication Bests Nation's Top Educational Publishers!
Youth Communication won the top prize, the Distinguished Achievement Award, in all four high school categories for which it was competing in the 2011 contest sponsored by the Association of Educational Publishers.

Periodical of the Year: New Youth Connections won this coveted award, triumphing over the Wall Street Journal Classroom Edition and UpFront, a joint effort of Scholastic and The New York Times.

Real Men, Youth Communication's program on masculinity for young men of color, won for Best Curriculum, Life Skills and Character Education.

Represent magazine won Best One-Theme Issue for its special Summer 2010 issue on Sex and Pregnancy.

New Youth Connections won for Best Series for its stories on the impact of war on teens.

Librarians Pick Haiti on My Mind

Haiti on My Mind was chosen as one of the 40 best books for teens published in 2010 by the Pennsylvania School Library Association. Haiti on My Mind features two dozen stories by Haitian teens on universal themes, plus an foreword by Edwidge Danticat, the acclaimed Haitian-American writer (and Youth Communication alumna).

Here is a selection of other awards. (For more awards and achievements, see News and Events.)

Educational Publishing Awards (magazines)
Youth Communication’s stories, magazines, and curricula have been finalists and won top awards more than 20 times since the 1990s in the annual competition sponsored by the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP)—even though competing against adult-written publications.

Our foster care magazine, Represent, has been a finalist for the Golden Lamp award for the best educational magazine in the country, and is a winner of the prestigious and rarely bestowed Judges’ Award for best overall magazine. Our high school magazine, New Youth Connections, has frequently won first prize or been a finalist in the categories of best single issue and best series for high school students.

Educational Publishing Awards (books)
Our resilience anthology, The Struggle to Be Strong, won Parents Guide and Parents Choice awards.

Two Youth Communication books have won the top prize in the category of best high school age book for a specialized audience from the Association of Educational Publishers: Do You Have What It Takes: A Comprehensive Guide to Success After Foster Care; and Real Stories, Real Teens.

National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award
Youth Communication was a recipient of a 2000 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award (formerly Coming Up Taller), which is given each year by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, to 10 of the best youth arts and humanities programs in the country.

Journalism Awards
Youth Communication stories and publications have won several awards in both teen and adult categories in the annual journalism contest sponsored by Mental Health America, including Virgen Nunez’s story “I’m Not Crazy, I Have a Mental Illness,” which was a winner in 2010, and Pauline Gordons “Living with Ghosts” about mental illness in the family.

Youth Communication’s teen writers have won five IPPIEs, awarded by the New York Community Media Alliance, competing against adult writers from the independent and ethnic press in New York City. Orubba Almansouri won First Prize for her 2009 story “University of Kitchen?” about her desire to go to college. Donald Moore won Second Prize for “Prisoners in Our Schools” about police harassment of students on the streets around their high schools.

Represent magazine was awarded a Casey Medal from the Casey Journalism Center in 1995, and an Anna Quindlen Award for Excellence in Journalism in Behalf of Children and Families from the Child Welfare League of America in 1997.

MacArthur Fellowships & Misc. Awards
Executive Director Keith Hefner won a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship in 1989 for his work founding and directing Youth Communication. He also won the Luther P. Jackson Award for Excellence in Journalism Education from the New York Association of Black Journalists.

Alumna Edwidge Danticat won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010 for her novels and nonfiction writing. (Edwidge’s first novel, the Oprah’s Book Club selection Breath, Eyes, Memory, grew out of a story she published for Youth Communication as a teenager.) Danticat has also twice been a finalist for the National Book Award.

Editor Kendra Hurley won a 2004 PASEsetter Award as one of the five best after school staff in New York City.

Five Youth Communication staff members were awarded Revson Fellowships on the Future of New York City at Columbia University while working here:Al Desetta, Andrea Estepa, Keith Hefner, Phil Kay, and Abiodun Oyewole. ProQuest/SIRS (learning database for secondary school students).

Former Youth Communication teen writers have published over 50 books, including several books for young adults, almost all of which explore socially significant issues.

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