So, yeah, I won.

I honestly didn’t think LAWBI had a shot, as this isn’t exactly the usual lefty call-for-revolution sort of thing, so I’m truly surprised, and very, very stoked. I won a few awards over the course of my career as a full-time, aherm *cough* “journalist,” and while it pleased me, I never really thought of them as a big deal. But this is different, because it comes directly from the alt-weekly community–a group, a network and an idea that’s near and dear to my heart.

Alt-weeklies are always the scrappy punk-rock underdog publications in any community, the papers that cover the cool bands and feature writers for whom style and passion are every bit as important as content. They were the blogs before there were blogs, with the important distinction that you had to know a bit about your subject and be able to write worth a shit to get published. The day a decade ago when I was offered a full-time position at Creative Loafing (then Weekly Planet) remains one of the proudest of my life thus far, and I hope the alt-weeklies keep printing, tilting at various political windmills and generally being awesome for a long, long time to come.