A talented and eclectic group of journalists comprise the 2018 Daily Texan Hall of Fame honorees group, including the first female sportswriter to break the glass ceiling in the press box in Texas, a close aide to Lyndon Johnson, the author of “Old Yeller,” a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, a much-loved journalist turned professor, a prolific author of best-selling Western novels, an editorial adviser during a tumultuous period for The Texan and two pioneering food journalists,
In addition, two Rising Star winners were selected, representing the best and brightest of today’s generation of journalists.
The awards will be presented by Friends of The Daily Texan, Inc., at a dinner Oct. 26 in the Shirley Bird Perry Ballroom of The Texas Union, on the University of Texas campus in Austin.
The awards are sponsored annually by the Friends of The Daily Texan, a nonprofit group established in 2013 to support journalistic quality and a strong future in a digital world for The Daily Texan, student newspaper at the University of Texas at Austin.
The FOTDT last year also set up an endowment for an annual scholarship for a Texan staffer.
Registration is now open at https://friendsdailytexan.wildapricot.org/event-2548822
“Please take the time to read every word of their bios,” said Friends President John Reetz. “Now, more than ever, in a time when the press faces challenges from every quarter, understanding what these journalists have done, and all journalists are doing today, makes you appreciate the contribution of journalism to our society, and the importance of The Daily Texan as their launching pad. And even better, come in person to celebrate journalism, Oct. 26 at The Union.”
The list of earlier inductees includes Walter Cronkite, Lady Bird Johnson, Richard Elam, Bill Moyers, Liz Carpenter, Ronnie Dugger, Dewitt C. Reddick, Berkeley Breathed, Robert Rodriguez, Sen. Judith Zaffirini, Tex Schramm, Liz Smith and other Texan “graduates”.
This year’s Daily Texan Hall of Fame inductees are:
- Bob Hilburn, winner of the Griff Singer Award and long-time editorial adviser to The Texan, and a distinguished World War II reporter and national reporter. He was in the motorcade and covered the Kennedy assassination.
- Margaret Koy Kistler was a pioneer Texas sportswriter and a member of one of Texas’ greatest sports families. She helped to knock down doors and break gender barriers for today’s female sportswriters.
- Horace Busby Jr. was an early defender of academic freedom as editor of The Daily Texan and later was a White House aide and longtime confidante and associate of former President Lyndon B. Johnson.
- Frederick Benjamin “Fred” Gipson is best known for writing the 1956 novel Old Yeller, which became a popular 1957 Walt Disney He also wrote numerous short stories and novels with a Western theme.
- Lucian Perkins is a two time Pulitzer Prize winner and a staff photographer at The Washington Post for more than 20 years; additional awards include “Newspaper Photographer of the Year” by the National Press Photographers Association and “World Press Photo of the Year.”
- Elmer Kelton wrote over 62 fiction and non-fiction books. Three of Kelton’s novels have appeared in Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Four books have won the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, Oklahoma City. Eight have won the Spur award from Western Writers of America.
- Griff Singer is a long-time journalist who, at the Dallas Morning News, helped direct coverage of the Kennedy assassination and the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. After his reporting career he became as a professor at UT and trained thousands of young journalists. He is the recipient of many journalistic awards and honors.
- Elaine Corn is a newspaper-trained reporter, editor, broadcaster, food writer, teacher, and cookbook author. She has written six cookbooks, and also taught food journalism at colleges and culinary schools in Northern California. Her work has appeared in magazines, newspapers and culinary websites.
- Dotty Griffith worked at the Dallas Morning News for 36 years, 16 as Food Editor and 10 as Restaurant Critic and Dining Editor and has written for The New York Times, Gourmet, Ladies Home Journal, Southern Living, Travel and Leisure, Wine Spectator, Texas Highways, and Horse and Rider. She has appeared on the Travel Channel, Fox and Friends, and the Food Network, and has written 12 cookbooks.
Rising Star Award Winners
- Madlin Mekelburg is an Austin-based reporter for the El Paso Times and the USA Today Network, where she covers politics, border issues and all things Texas. Before joining The Times, Madlin was a fellow in the Austin bureau of the Dallas Morning News where she covered the Texas Legislature and wrote about women’s health, guns and mental health.
- Katey Psencik is an online content producer for the Austin American-Statesman, writing stories and managing social media primarily for Austin360.com, the Statesman’s features and entertainment section. Since joining the Statesman, she’s worked on multiple digital projects, including the creation of an online guide to parties and events during South by Southwest. She regularly works with reporters to create compelling, digital-focused online content for Austin360.
Please read their full biographies below.
In addition, attendees will hear Oct. 26 from the current editor and managing editor of The Daily Texan about the paper’s challenges and efforts today.
And a Silent Auction will be held, including items donated by previous Texan staffers, including a current political cartoon signed by Pulitzer Prize winner Ben Sargent, and signed cartoon panels from Pulitzer Winner Berkeley Breathed, creator of Bloom County.
2018 Hall of Fame Honorees
Griff Singer Award
Bob Hilburn – long-time editorial advisor, The Daily Texan
Robert (Bob) Edwin Hilburn served as Editorial Adviser for The Daily Texan for 20 years, following a distinguished career as a Marine Corps correspondent with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. A native of Wichita Falls, he graduated from Wichita Falls High School in 1940 as president of his senior class, and pursuing an accelerated wartime course of study, he received a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Missouri in 1943.
Bob’s first newspaper job was as a cub reporter for the Wichita Falls Daily Times in 1942. In Missouri, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and was assigned as the youngest combat correspondent after training at Parris Island, Camp Lejeune, Quantico, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.
Joining the Eighth Marine Regiment, Second Marine Division, on Saipan, Mariana Islands, he served during the pacification of Saipan, Tinian, the invasion of Okinawa, Ryukyu Islands and the occupation of Japan. On Okinawa, he was the only newsman present when Army General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Corps commander of the invasion forces, was killed by an enemy artillery round at a forward command post of the Eighth Marines. In Japan, he went ashore at Nagasaki, only a few days after the atomic bomb leveled the city.
In 1948, Bob began his newspaper career at the Fort Worth Star Telegram progressing from police and court coverage to investigative work that helped lead to the end of gambling and the ouster of several public officials in Tarrant County. In 1962, he was given leave of absence to serve as press secretary for John Connolly, governor candidate in the Democratic primary. Politics, local, state and national continued to demand his attention, and he covered a handful of legislative sessions and several presidential conventions. In 1963, the Fort Worth Star Telegram sent him to Washington to bolster its national reporting, and Bob soon found himself head of a bureau reporting for a consortium of five Texas newspapers.
Bob was in the White House press bus in the presidential motorcade when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and wrote the lead story for the Star Telegram with its electrifying details and starkness of truth. Bob then directed extensive coverage of the 1964 presidential campaign that put LBJ in the White House. In 1965, he left the pressures of the bureau and returned to Texas to become Editorial Manager of The Daily Texan at UT, where he served until retiring in 1985. Bob died in May 2014.
Hall of Fame Honorees
Margaret Koy Kistler – pioneer female sportswriter
Margaret Koy Kistler was a pioneer Texas sportswriter and a member of one of Texas’ greatest sports families.
Kistler helped to knock down doors and break gender barriers for today’s female sportswriter. When hired as a sportswriter for the Abilene Reporter News – the first woman to hold that position in the state – she immediately made her presence known in the male-dominated domain of high school press boxes.
Kistler gravitated toward sports naturally as the daughter of Ernie Koy Sr., who was a three-time all-Southwest Conference back for the Texas Longhorns from 1930-32 and played major league baseball from 1938-1942. Her brothers, Ernie Jr. and Ted, played on national title teams at UT.
But Kistler carved out her own niche in sports, said Ken Dabbs, who coached the Koy siblings at Bellville before going on to a successful career as an assistant coach at Texas.
“When people would ask me, who was the best punter I had in my high school days, I would say Ernie Koy in the eighth grade,” Dabbs said. “And when they would ask me about the second-best, I would say Margaret Koy in the seventh grade. What a wonderful person she was.”
Kistler began writing a column titled Koy’s Comments for the weekly Bellville Times as a teenager and in 1967, after attending the University of Texas and covering sports for The Daily Texan, joined the Abilene Reporter-News.
Her first assignment, covering The Kings of West Texas high school football team, was met with great disapproval by the coaches and team players. Even though the team greeted her with total silence and blank stars, Kistler was able to prevail using her witty personality and journalistic skill to perform the interview with ease.
One of her first interview subjects was Spike Dykes, the future Texas Tech coach who was then the coach at Big Spring High School. “High school football was big time in that district, and in walks this girl who is going to be a sports writer,” Dykes said. “I said, ‘I hope you’re tough enough,’ and she said, ‘My name is Koy. Don’t worry about that.’She did a good job of reporting on us. She was fair and fun, and it was always a joy to see her.”
Kistler’s professionalism eventually propelled her to a successful career with the Austin Bureau, the Temple Daily Telegram and the Dallas Morning News.
Horace Busby – defender of academic freedom and aide to LBJ
Horace Busby Jr. was an early defender of academic freedom as editor of The Daily Texan and later was a White House aide and longtime associate of former President Lyndon B. Johnson.
At The Daily Texan, his editorials supported Homer P. Rainey, who was fired by the board of regents as president of the school system for his liberal policies regarding academic freedom. The paper’s influence spread beyond the campus and was read by Johnson, then a congressman with higher ambitions.
Busby left college two credits short of graduation and worked three years in the Austin bureau of the old International News Service. In 1946, Johnson hired Busby as a speech writer with the 1948 Senate race in view.
Busby, a fellow Texan known as Buzz, served President Johnson as, among other things, a speechwriter and an idea man. He was an important aide to Johnson in various phases of his political career.
After Johnson became president when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, he was named a special assistant to Johnson. Busby served as the liaison between the executive departments and the White House. He also was a deputy to McGeorge Bundy, then special presidential assistant for national security affairs.
He and Johnson had a special bond, as described by Eric F. Goldman in his book, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: “More than any other member of his staff, Lyndon Johnson believed, Horace Busby thought and felt like him. This did not leave Busby entirely comfortable, but at least with respect to a number of hour-by-hour situations, it was accurate and Busby was most often the man who served as LBJ’s other self.”
At first, Busby agreed to remain on the president’s staff only through the election of November 1964, when Johnson defeated his Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, in a landslide.
Johnson persuaded Busby to stay a few months longer, but he resigned in September 1965, and returned to private life. As he left public service, he received a letter from Johnson that said: ”As a counselor, you have been wise. As an administrator, you have been unsparing toward yourself. As a friend, you have been, and you are, a never-failing source of strength to me.”
But that was not the end of his work for Johnson. James R. Jones, who was the president’s chief of staff in 1968, recalled that early that year Johnson told him to put Busby back to work on an ”I will not run” peroration in which the president, whose escalation of the Vietnam War led to student unrest and a bitterly divided nation, would disclose that he would not seek re-election.
Earlier, he had been assigned to write such a passage for another Johnson speech, but the president changed his mind.
On March 31, 1968, however, at the end of a nationally televised speech in which he announced the cessation of bombing north of the 21st parallel in Vietnam, the president made his surprise statement that he would not run again.
Busby also authored The Thirty-First of March, an intimate memoir of his 20-year relationship with LBJ. It was published posthumously in 2004 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Busby was born in Fort Worth and died in June 2000.
Fred Gipson – author of “Old Yeller”
Frederick Benjamin “Fred” Gipson is best known for writing the 1956 novel “Old Yeller,” which became a popular 1957 Walt Disney film. Gipson was born on a farm near Mason in the Texas Hill Country. After working at a variety of farming and ranching jobs, he enrolled in 1933 at the University of Texas at Austin. There he wrote for The Daily Texan and The Ranger, but he left school before graduating to become a newspaper journalist.
In the 1940s, Gipson began writing short stories with a Western theme, which proved to be prototypes for his longer works of fiction that followed. In 1946, his first full-length book, The Fabulous Empire: Colonel Zack Miller’s Story, was published.
Hound-Dog Man, published in 1947, established Gipson’s reputation when it became a Doubleday Book-of-the-Month Club selection and sold over 250,000 copies in its first year of publication. It was made into a film in 1959. His additional works included The Home Place (later filmed as Return of the Texan, a 1952 Western starring Dale Robertson and Joanne Dru), Big Bend: A Homesteader’s Story, Cowhand: The Story of a Working Cowboy, The Trail-Driving Rooster, and Recollection Creek.
His novel “Old Yeller” won the Newbery honor, and was adapted into a 1957 Walt Disney Studios film. Old Yeller has two sequels – Savage Sam (1962), which also became a Walt Disney film in 1963, and Little Arliss, published posthumously in 1978.
Old Yeller was the novel that Gipson considered his best work. Set in the Texas Hill Country in the 1860s just after the American Civil War, the story is about the 14-year-old boy Travis Coates (played by Tommy Kirk in the film) left in charge of the household while his father is away. Old Yeller, a stray dog adopted by the boy, helps in the formidable task of protecting the family on the Texas ranch.
Lucian Perkins – two time Pulitzer Prize winning photographer
Two time Pulitzer Prize winner Lucian Perkins is an independent photographer and filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. He was a Daily Texan and Cactus photographer in 1978 and 1979.
As a staff photographer at The Washington Post for more than 20 years, Lucian covered major international events such as the fall of the Soviet Union and its aftermath, the wars and refugee crises in the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Iraq and Afghanistan, and major events at home.
Lucian received his first Pulitzer Prize for collaboration with Post reporter Leon Dash on their four-year study of the effects of poverty on three generations of a Washington, D.C., family through the eyes of the matriarch. His second was for coverage of the Kosovo conflict.
Additional awards include being named “Newspaper Photographer of the Year” by the National Press Photographers Association and selection of one of his photographs as the “World Press Photo of the Year.” Lucian also worked closely with the online edition to produce many of the Post’s first multimedia and interactive projects.
As an independent filmmaker, his first full-length documentary, The Messengers, follows two young volunteers who are transformed by the residents of a hospice for homeless HIV/AIDs patients. It premiered at FilmFestDC in April 2017. He has filmed and produced short films on the Syrian refugee crisis, South Sudan, and the obesity and health crisis in America.
Colleagues in Russia were the inspiration to co-found InterFoto, an annual non-profit international photography conference held in Moscow that provided a competition as well as exchange programs and workshops.
Solo and group exhibitions have shown at World Press, Amsterdam; ART in Embassies Program in Sarajevo, Havana, Tokyo and Ankara; Newseum in Washington, D.C., San Francisco and New York; and Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University, Durham, among other venues.
Elmer Kelton – prolific author of Western novels
Elmer Kelton wrote over 62 fiction and non-fiction books, published over more than 50 years.
Three of Kelton’s novels have appeared in Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Four books have won the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, Oklahoma City: The Time It Never Rained, The Good Old Boys, The Man Who Rode Midnight and the text for The Art of Howard Terpning.
Eight have won the Spur award from Western Writers of America: Buffalo Wagons, The Day the Cowboys Quit, The Time It Never Rained, Eyes of the Hawk, Slaughter, The Far Canyon, The Way of the Coyote and Many A River.
In 1987 he received the Barbara McCombs/Lon Tinkle Award for “continuing excellence in Texas letters” from the Texas Institute of Letters. In 1990 he received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association. The Texas Legislature proclaimed Elmer Kelton Day in April 1997. In 1998 he received the first Lone Star award for lifetime Achievement from the Larry McMurtry Center for Arts and Humanities at Midwestern State University, Wichita Falls, Texas. He also received honorary doctorates from Hardin-Simmons University and Texas Tech University. He was given a lifetime achievement award by the National Cowboy Symposium in Lubbock, Texas.
In 1996 Kelton became an honorary member of the German Association for the Study of the Western, headquartered in Münster, Germany. This organization presents the Elmer Kelton Award for Literary Merit.
Kelton is a native of Crane, Texas. He attended the University of Texas at Austin in 1942-44 and 1946-48, earning a B.A. degree in journalism. He spent 15 years as farm and ranch writer-editor for the San Angelo Standard-Times, five years as editor of Sheep and Goat Raiser Magazine and 22 years as associate editor of Livestock Weekly, from which he retired in 1990.
He served two years in the U. S. Army, 1944-46, including combat infantry service in Europe. The Good Old Boys was made into a 1995 TV movie starring Tommy Lee Jones for the TNT cable network. He died in 2009..
Griff Singer – long-time journalist and professor
Over the past 60-plus years, Griff Singer been a printer, a reporter, editor, teacher and newspaper consultant. And even though he technically retired in 2003 after 34 years of teaching, he’s stayed quite busy in journalism.
In his teaching career, all at UT Austin, Singer taught courses in reporting, copyediting, newspaper layout and design. He organized and team-taught the first offering of computer-assisted reporting and later sports writing. Singer holds Bachelor of Journalism (1955) and Master of Arts in communication (1972) from UT Austin.
While an undergraduate student at UT, he was a reporter and day editor for The Daily Texan for two years. Then at 6:30 p.m., five nights a week, he changed from clean shirt and pants and donned dingy jeans, T-shirt and printers’ apron to work as a printer in the composing room of The Daily Texan. His first journalism job was news editor at the Arlington (Texas) Citizen-Journal (1956-59).
A long-time goal was to work for his favorite hometown paper, the Dallas Morning News. Singer was offered a job as a general assignments reporter. That grew into covering county government and civil and criminal courts. In early 1961 he was named an assistant city editor.
Singer stayed with the News until 1967, when returned to UT and Austin to teach in the School of Journalism. In 1979 Singer accepted the job of city editor and assistant managing editor at the San Antonio Light, the Hearst newspaper later rolled into the San Antonio Express-News.
He has participated in countless seminars and workshops conducted for state, regional and national journalism organizations — the National and Texas Associated Press Managing Editors Association, the Texas Press Association and the Society of Professional Journalists. He has been a judge in many state and national journalism competitions and in 1993 was one of 13 jurors selected for the international competition of the Society of News Design. For 17 summers, beginning in 1987, he was an assistant metro editor and newsroom consultant at the Houston Chronicle.
He also consulted with Freedom Communications, Inc., a California-based corporation that at the time had 26 daily newspapers. In 1996, he was a copy editor on the Olympics Daily published by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution during the 1996 Summer Olympics and in 1994 was on the first team of Western journalists to go to the former Soviet state of Kyrgyzstan to work with Russian-trained journalists in adapting to a free press.
The Texas Associated Press Managing Editors Association in 1998 cited Singer for his service to journalism in Texas by presenting him with the Jack Douglas Award that honors a former editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In 2003, he was awarded the title of “Wirehandler for Life,” for his many years of participating in the annual Texas Associated Press Workshops for editors and copy editors.
The South Texas Press Association, the largest regional press group in the United States, in 2010 named its general excellence award The S. Griffin Singer General Excellence Award, noting his continued call for improvement in community journalism.
He served 17 years as director of the Dow Jones News Fund’s Center for Editing Excellence at UT. His UT career was centered in the classroom, working with upper division journalism students, helping them master professional skills in writing, editing and design. This is where he fostered long lasting relationships with many students. He also served as associate chairman and head of newspaper studies for many years.
In 2016 he was inducted into the Texas Newspaper Foundation Hall of Fame.
Among his career highlights were helping direct coverage of the assassination of President John Kennedy and the ensuing investigation and the trial of Jack Ruby for the slaying of Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s assassin. And in 2001, while working at the Houston Chronicle, he served as the primary line editor and rewrite in the early days of the tragic story of Andrea Yates, the mother who drowned her five children.
Elaine Corn – pioneering food journalist
Elaine Corn is a newspaper-trained reporter, editor, broadcaster, food writer, teacher, and cookbook author. An award-winning career in daily journalism began during high school journalism in her adopted hometown of El Paso, Texas. She was published by age 16.
Elaine was born in New Jersey and attended the University of Texas-Austin where she worked for The Daily Texan for 2 ½ years as copy editor for the national/international page. On the Sunday night of June 17, 1972, while working for Monday’s edition, she ripped a wire story about some burglars at Democratic National Headquarters in a building called The Watergate. It didn’t even say Bulletin.
She was graduated in December 1972 with a Bachelor of Journalism and minors in English and Sociology. Two and a half weeks later, she began her first professional job at The Dallas Morning News as copy editor and telegraph editor. After a few years, Elaine returned to Austin to join the news staff of The Austin American-Statesman. She held positions of copy editor and front-page news editor for the paper’s long-deceased Bulldog edition. While at the Statesman she won an Associated Press Managing Editors award for front-page design.
During the great culinary awakening of the mid-1970s, the Austin American-Statesman didn’t have a food section. With her interest in food and experience as a news editor, Elaine became the paper’s founding food editor.
In 1980, Elaine cooked her way through England, Holland, France, Switzerland, Italy and Greece. On the island of Rhodes, she was hired as the cook on a 71-foot luxury yacht. It sailed eight (rich) Italian vacationers around the coast of Turkey. At various ports, Elaine bought ingredients at shuks and bazaars and paid with illegal Marlboros. Her trip ended in Israel in the kitchen of the kibbutz founded by the daughter of Golda Meier, where she cooked for 600 members.
In 1981, Elaine became food editor of The Louisville Courier-Journal. She was responsible for cover features, original recipe development, food styling and community outreach. Five years later, she arrived at The Sacramento Bee. Her beat took her to such areas as Napa Valley, Sonoma, San Francisco, Mendocino and Lake Tahoe to cover wine, chefs, competitions and idiotic diets. While at The Bee, Elaine received five national awards, including 1st Place for Best Food Reporting; 2nd Place for Best Food Section, and two awards for opinion.
Since 1991, Elaine has been a freelancer. For three years, she anchored an hour-long radio call-in show. She was a featured writing speaker at the Symposium for Professional Food Writers and at conferences by the International Association of Food Professionals and Les Dames d’Escoffier. Elaine also taught food journalism at colleges and culinary schools in Northern California. Her work has appeared in magazines, newspapers and culinary websites.
Elaine is author of six cookbooks. Now You’re Cooking: Everything a Beginner Needs to Know to Start Cooking Today took double awards at the 1994 Julia Child and James Beard Cookbook Awards.
Her last newsroom was at Capital Public Radio, the NPR affiliate in Sacramento, CA. She was the station’s first food reporter. She learned to produce her own stories — reported, wrote really short sentences and built sound-rich long-format stories using audio editing technology. Several stories aired on NPR. Of interest was a story about a UC-Davis study that revealed rampant olive oil fraud. Rogue oil from Europe tricked customers into buying high priced extra-virgin olive oil when inside the bottle could be hazelnut oil with green food coloring or inferior oils packaged in Europe but shipped from other countries. Some California olive oils didn’t pass three primary tests for purity, mostly because they were rancid.
Elaine also wrote food-related Sunday op-eds for The Sacramento Bee. Now back in print, she continued to annoy the olive oil industry. Her stories were used in testimony at the California Department of Food and Agriculture preceding a decision to enact stricter California olive oil labeling laws, approved in 2014.
Dotty Griffith – pioneering food journalist
Dotty Griffith, a native of Terrell, received her B.J. from the University. While on the staff of The Daily Texan, she was a general assignments reporter, covered the Legislature and state politics, and served as assistant to the editor.
After graduation in 1972, Dotty began her journalism career at the Dallas Morning News. She worked as a general assignments reporter and covered the mid-cities area of Dallas-Fort Worth. After management transferred her to the “women’s section,” she worked her way up to become the newspaper’s Food Editor. In 1996, Dotty became the restaurant critic for the DMN and held that position for ten years. She retired from the DMN in 2006.
Dotty worked at the Dallas Morning News for 36 years, 16 as Food Editor and 10 as Restaurant Critic and Dining Editor.
Dotty has written for the New York Times, Gourmet, Ladies Home Journal, Southern Living, Travel and Leisure, Wine Spectator, Texas Highways, and Horse and Rider. She has appeared on the Travel Channel, Fox and Friends, and the Food Network. For many years she had a regular weekly radio program, “In the Kitchen with Dotty,” on KRLD in Dallas-Fort Worth.
She has been a judge in national recipe contests, cook-offs, and cookbook competitions, and has served on the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ Cookbook Awards Committee and the James Beard Foundation’s Journalism Awards Committee. Dotty has written 12 cookbooks, ranging from “Wild About Chili” (1985) to her latest, “The Ultimate Tortilla Press Cookbook” (2018).
In 2008, Dotty became Public Education Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, first in Austin and later in Houston. She returned to Dallas in 2013 as Executive Director of the Greater Dallas Restaurant Association, but later left that position to return to full-time food writing as a freelancer and cookbook author.
Dotty presently is an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of North Texas, teaching a course in culinary journalism.
Rising Star Award
Madlin Mekelburg – El Paso Times Austin bureau reporter
Madlin Mekelburg is an Austin-based reporter for the El Paso Times and the USA Today Network, where she covers politics, border issues and all things Texas.
Before joining The Times, Madlin was a fellow in the Austin bureau of the Dallas Morning News where she covered the Texas Legislature and wrote about women’s health, guns and mental health.
Madlin previously held internships at the Houston Chronicle, Texas Tribune and the Austin American-Statesman.
She studied journalism and French at the University of Texas and graduated in 2016. At The Daily Texan, Madlin worked as a senior reporter, associate news editor and special ventures editor.
She also spent a semester co-hosting The Daily Texan podcast.
Katey Psencik – Austin American-Statesman, online editor
Katey Psencik is an online content producer for the Austin American-Statesman, writing stories and managing social media primarily for Austin360.com, the Statesman’s features and entertainment section.
Since joining the Statesman, she’s worked on multiple digital projects, including the creation of an online guide to parties and events during South by Southwest. She regularly works with reporters to create compelling, digital-focused online content for Austin360.
While Katey was at UT Austin, she worked for various arms of Texas Student Media, including Longhorn Life and the Cactus Yearbook. She received her Bachelor of Journalism degree in 2013.
After completing internships in the radio, newspaper, digital and marketing worlds, she worked as a digital content producer at KVUE, the Austin ABC affiliate, from 2013 to 2015. She briefly worked at KLRU, Austin’s PBS station, and The Daily Dot before joining the Statesman in October 2016.
Katey remains heavily involved with UT, including currently serving on the Texas Exes Austin Chapter Young Alumni Committee, and regularly works with current and former students pursuing careers in the journalism industry.