About Richard J. Margolis Career Highlights selected articles Selected New Leader Columns Reports & Monographs Op-Ed Pieces & Book Reviews   Past Winners 2011 Sabine Heinlein   2010 Doug Hunt   2009 Joe Wilkins   2008 Gabriel Thompson   2007 Stephanie Griest   2006 Marie myung-ok lee   2005 Kisha Lewellyn   2004 NeLson smith   2003 John Bowe   2002 Iyesatta Massaquoi   2001 Otis Haschemeyer   2000 Adrian Nicole LeBlanc   1999 Susan Parker   1998 Laura Distelheim   1997 Julie Lasky   1996 E.J. Graff   1995 Josip Novakovich   1994 Maggie Dubris   1993 Judith Levine   1992 Richard Manning

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is a journalist whose documentary reportage illuminates  the lives of adolescents, particularly those living in poverty. Her articles on  issues including juvenile justice, women in prison, and outcast children have  appeared in the Village Voice, Esquire, and the New York Times Sunday  Magazine. She has been a Knight Foundation Fellow at Yale Law School and a  Fellow at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute.

The Center on Crime, Communities, and Culture of the Open Society Institute awarded LeBlanc a 2001 Media Fellowship, which enabled her to write a  series of articles about the impact of incarceration on children.

"The lives of teenagers are demonized, much in the same way that those of  children are sentimentalized," says LeBlanc. "When these lives unfold in places  exhausted by poverty and its related burdens, the texture of their real  experience is obscured. I hope that my work contributes to help clearing up the  blind spots that unnecessarily result from that."

LeBlanc won the Margolis Award while working on her book, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, which was published by Scribner in 2003. The book won the Borders Original Voices Award for Nonfiction, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was chosen by the New York Times Book Review editors as one of the top nine books of the year. Random Family chronicles the struggles of an impoverished extended family in New York. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s research into these realities was extensive and took her more than ten years. She was present at prison visits, welfare appointments, and parent-teacher conferences. She absolved a Master’s program in law at Yale in order to understand her subject’s trials. After completing the book she is now considering a follow-up project on some of the children in the book.