Community Media Workshop

 2008 Studs Terkel Community Media Awards Winner, Dawn Turner Trice

Some reporters have a nose for news, and some columnists have a soapbox to stand on. Dawn Turner Trice has an eye for the visual, an ear for the cadence, rhythm and melody of her sources' voices, and an instinct for stories.

"I can see a story and sniff it out … look at a person and tell if there's a story there," she says.

Growing up in Bronzeville's Theodore K. Lawless apartments sandwiched between the upper crust in Lake Meadows and tenants at Ida B. Wells public housing development, Dawn watched her African-American community sub-divide: she remembers roaming the 'hood in the 1970s, then saw a chain-link fence go up, later to be replaced by wrought iron. Looking back, she sees the fences as metaphor for race and class.

Race in Chicago is "not a black and white thing," she says. For one thing, race is is often a proxy for class and can divide or unite Black folks as well as across ethnic or cultural lines. What connection to Studs Terkel's work she has springs from this viewpoint: "I am a fan of someone who really has spent a lot of time trying to puzzle over race…. If you look at his body of work, I think he has to have said to himself, 'If I can make a difference in a small way, [it was worth it.]' It sounds pollyanna-ish, but that is still the mission of my column."

Although race and issues relevant to Black folks here are part of her beat, what really drives Dawn is a storytelling bug that bit her early.

"I was supposed to be a doctor," Dawn says. But if her parents were aiming to instill a scholarly attitude in their daughters (her sister is deceased), they may have miscalculated. Growing up, Dawn says, "if you were writing or reading, you didn't have to do any chores. If we were sitting in the middle of the floor, my mother would mop around us."

Dawn and her sister hid under the table at gatherings of family and friends, listened to everything, and, she says, "when my mother was holding court, I loved it." She started writing early, too: a teacher recently told the 42-year-old he has hung on to a book of poetry she wrote in fourth grade.

Dawn went to Hyde Park High School and a University of Chicago academic-year/summer enrichment program, then attended University of Illinois; she read the news at an Urbana/Champaign radio station, then followed a friend to a news internship program in New York, worked briefly at the Sun-times, then found her way to the Orlando Sentinel, a Tribune affiliate. At the Chicago Tribune, she has been a Southwest Side bureau chief, reporter, and editorial board staffer before taking on the column six years ago. Dawn, her husband David, and their daughter Hannah live in the southern suburbs.


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