The New York Public Library has named Jill Leovy the winner of the 2016 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. For her win, she will receive $15,000 in prize money.
According to the press release, this award recognizes “working journalists whose books have brought clarity and public attention to important issues, events or policies.” Leovy was honored with this award for her 2015 nonfiction book, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America.
Ghettoside features an examination of a homicide case where the victim is a young black man. “The book stems from Leovy’s work with the ‘Homicide Report,’ which aimed in 2007 to chronicle every murder that took place in Los Angeles.”