Steve Lopez, columnist at the Los Angeles Times and winner of the 2021 Nyhan Prize for Political Journalism, accepted his award and joined 2018 Nyhan Prize winner David Von Drehle in a conversation about his career and the importance of political journalism that centers on the lives and interests of everyday people.
2021 Nyhan Prize Winner Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez is a California native who has been an L.A. Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards for his reporting and column writing at seven newspapers and four news magazines, and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist for commentary – in 2012, for his columns on elder care; in 2016, for his columns on income inequality in California; in 2018, for his columns on housing and homelessness; and in 2020, for purposeful pieces about rising homelessness in Los Angeles, which amplified calls for government action to deal with a long-visible public crisis. He is the author of three novels, two collections of columns and a non-fiction work called “The Soloist,” which was a Los Angeles Times and New York Times best-seller, winner of the PEN USA Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and the subject of a Dream Works movie by the same name. Lopez’s television reporting for public station KCET has won three local news Emmys, three Golden Mike awards and a share of the Columbia University DuPont Award. Read his work at https://www.latimes.com/people/steve-lopez.
David Von Drehle
David Von Drehle is a columnist for The Washington Post, where he writes about national affairs and politics from a home base in the Midwest. He joined The Post in 2017 after a decade at Time magazine, where he wrote more than 60 cover stories as editor-at-large. During a previous stint at The Post, Von Drehle served as a writer and editor on the National staff, in Style, and at the Magazine. He is the author of a number of books, including the award-winning bestseller “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.” He lives in Kansas City with his wife, journalist Karen Ball, and their four children. He was the winner of the 2018 Nyhan Prize for Political Journalism.
