The Aronson Awards

Social Justice Journalism & Cartooning with a Conscience

# Judges

Anthony Advincula is a New York City-based journalist and media consultant. He was the national media director and editor for New America Media (NAM), where he managed and organized journalism projects with ethnic media in 45 states, including Hawaii and Alaska. He was a former correspondent for the Associated Press, The Jersey Journal, editor of The Filipino Express, and the communications director and managing editor of the Independent Press Association-New York, where he co-edited Voices That Must Be Heard (which is now known as CUNY’s Voices of NY). He was a recipient of a number of journalism fellowships, including the New York Times Foreign Press Fellowship, National Health Journalism Fellowship, Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting and National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Addiction Studies Program for Journalists. Anthony attended Harvard University, University of the Philippines, and Columbia University, where he was awarded a Charles H. Revson Fellowship and received his master’s degrees in public administration and journalism.

Christopher T. Cory has been a correspondent, the Boston news bureau chief, and a writer for Time magazine; a Knight Fellow at Stanford University; managing editor of Psychology Today; and director of public information for the Carnegie Council on Children. He is co-author of Drugs from A (Alcohol) to V (Valium) (Little, Brown and Co.) and most recently served as the executive director of communications for Pace University.

Wayne Dawkins is an associate professor at Morgan State University School of Global Journalism and Communication. He is author of City Son, a biography of Brooklyn activist and journalist Andrew W. Cooper. Dawkins wrote two books about the National Association of Black Journalists, of which he was a board member and historian. He was a journalist for 23 years at daily newspapers in New York, New Jersey, Indiana, and Virginia. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Virginian-Pilot, and Black Issues Book Review. Dawkins is a distinguished journalism alumnus of Columbia University.

A native of Brooklyn, Erica Gonzalez is lifelong advocate for Latino and social justice issues. Her expertise and career is in journalism, digital media, and New York City government. As the former executive editor of El Diario/La Prensa, she conceptualized “Sept.11 – the Latino experience,” a 10th anniversary, ground-breaking, multiplatform and outreach project that focused on the implications of this devastating event on Latino workers, immigration policy, the local mayor’s race, and gentrification. She also spearheaded the development and implementation of Council 2.0, the first-ever digital inclusion and innovation plan for the New York City Council. Erica has degrees in journalism from Syracuse University and Columbia University.

A. Adam Glenn has worked for 35 years in newspaper, magazine and digital newsrooms in New York and Washington, D.C., including at ABCNews.com, where he served as senior producer. He has taught journalism on faculty at Columbia University, New York University and CUNY, and is currently a full-time distinguished lecturer at Hunter College. He’s also a long-time specialist in environmental news, and currently runs two climate change-related news services and a digital weekly news magazine for environmental reporters. He’s won numerous fellowships, grants and awards, including as a public policy scholar at the Wilson Center think tank and a Knight News Challenge award.

Marya Grambs has been a lifelong advocate for the rights of LGBTQ, women, girls and people with mental illness. She was one of the first leaders nationally in the domestic violence and women’s philanthropy movements, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She moved to Honolulu, and recently retired as Executive Director of Mental Health America of Hawaii; she is currently focusing on preventing homelessness, particularly among those with severe mental illness and/or substance use disorders. (Hawaii has the highest per capita rate of homelessness in the nation). She received a “Gloria” award from the Ms Foundation in New York, and Lifetime Achievement awards from Hawaii Women Lawyers and the Institute for Violence and Trauma Hawaii chapter. She lives in Kailua, Hawaii with her wife of 34 years.

Award winning international business journalist Sissel McCarthy is a Distinguished Lecturer and director of the Journalism Program at Hunter College. She has been teaching reporting, multimedia writing and news literacy to undergraduates for more than 12 years at Hunter College, NYU and Emory University. Her areas of expertise include news literacy, broadcast journalism, and news writing and production across all media platforms. Prior to her job in academe, McCarthy spent more than a decade reporting business news for CNN, CNBC and PBS from New York, London, and Atlanta. She anchored CNN International’s flagship business programs, World Business Today and World Business This Week from London. Before joining CNN International, McCarthy worked for CNBC in London as a correspondent and anchor covering international business and politics. She began her career in journalism as a writer and producer for CNN’s Moneyline in New York and won an ACE award in 1992 for the Moneyline special report, “Michael Milkin: Out of Jail Early.” Most recently, she worked for PBS and GPTV, producing, writing and reporting stories from Atlanta for the national PBS business program, Nightly Business Report.

Jarrett Murphy is the executive editor and publisher of City Limits, which has covered New York City affairs since 1976. Before joining City Limits in 2007, Murphy worked for the Hartford Advocate, the Village Voice and CBSNews.com. His work has appeared on WNYC, in Newsweek, the Daily News, CJR, and The Nation. He won the Aronson Award in 2008 for an investigation of bail. A graduate of Fordham University, he lives in the Bronx with his wife and two sons.

Alice Slater is New York director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and its UN representative. She has been an activist in the peace and environmental movements, working for many years to abolish nuclear weapons and presently serves on several coordinating committees and boards, including Abolition 2000, the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, World Beyond War, and the Rideau Institute. She is a member of the Environmental Committee of the New York City Bar Association and has published numerous articles and op-eds.

Alonzo Rico Speight is a writer/director/editor of film, theater, TV and Internet productions. He has directed award-winning documentaries, including The People United, on Boston’s racial strife in the 1980’s; his feature documentary Who’s Gonna Take the Weight?, on African American and black South African young people at the end of Apartheid, screened at the 52nd Cannes Film Festival. In 2017, Speight wrote, produced and directed the Off Off Broadway production Robeson and Dunham: Art & Activism 101. He is now producing a feature documentary on Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary psychiatrist, philosopher, and political theorist.

John Tarleton is Editor and co-founder of The Indypendent, a free, progressive newspaper and website published in New York City. He previously served as Associate Editor of Clarion, the newspaper of the Professional Staff Congress, the union that represents faculty and staff at the City University of New York. Tarleton has been awarded Best Feature Story three times by the New York Community Media Alliance and won numerous local and national awards for labor coverage during his time at Clarion.

Blanca Vázquez was an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College, where she was awarded the Presidential Insdorf Award for Excellence in Teaching for Part-Time Faculty in 2009. Vázquez is the founding editor of CENTRO, Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, and in 2002-2003 she was a Revson Fellow at Columbia University, where she had received her graduate degree in journalism. She has been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, the NY Daily News, Viva Magazine and the Oral History Review.

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga approaches art as a social practice that seeks to establish dialogue in public spaces. Having been born of immigrant parents and grown up between Nicaragua and San Francisco, a strong awareness of inequality and discrimination was established at an early age. Themes such as immigration, discrimination, gentrification and the effects of globalization extend from highly subjective experiences and observations into works that tactically engage others through popular metaphors while maintaining critical perspectives. Ricardo’s work has been exhibited at international venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York Hall of Science; Matadero Madrid, Spain; Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; National Center for Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia; Museum of Image and Sound, Sao Paulo, Brazil.