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Finalist: Tampa Bay Times, by Laura Reiley

For lively restaurant reviews, including a series that took on the false claims of the farm-to-table movement and prompted statewide investigations.

Nominated Work

Biography

Laura Reiley is the Tampa Bay Times' restaurant critic and a former critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Baltimore Sun. She is the author of four books in the Moon Handbook series: Florida Gulf Coast; Walt Disney World and Orlando; Tampa and St. Petersburg; and the Paradise Coast. She has cooked professionally and is a graduate of the California Culinary Academy.

Winners

Prize Winner in Criticism in 2017:

Hilton Als

For bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality and race. Criticism

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Criticism in 2017:

Ty Burr

For a wide range of finely cut reviews of films and other cultural topics written with wit, deep sensibility and a refreshing lack of pretension.

The Jury

Madeleine Blais(Chair)*

Professor of Journalism

Adam Cohen

Co-Editor

Danielle Henderson

freelance writer

Manuela Hoelterhoff*

retired cultural critic

Jay Stowe

Editor-in-Chief

Winners in Criticism

Emily Nussbaum

For television reviews written with an affection that never blunts the shrewdness of her analysis or the easy authority of her writing.

Mary McNamara

For savvy criticism that uses shrewdness, humor and an insider's view to show how both subtle and seismic shifts in the cultural landscape affect television.

Inga Saffron

For her criticism of architecture that blends expertise, civic passion and sheer readability into arguments that consistently stimulate and surprise.

Philip Kennicott

For his eloquent and passionate essays on art and the social forces that underlie it, a critic who always strives to make his topics and targets relevant to readers.

2017 Prize Winners

C. J. Chivers

For showing, through an artful accumulation of fact and detail, that a Marine’s postwar descent into violence reflected neither the actions of a simple criminal nor a stereotypical case of PTSD.

Peggy Noonan

For rising to the moment with beautifully rendered columns that connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation’s most divisive political campaigns.

Hilton Als

For bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality and race.

Art Cullen

For editorials fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa.