Brief by Central Staff
Colorado Central – March 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
Honored Poet
Lynda La Rocca of Twin Lakes, a frequent contributor to these pages, has won a couple of prizes for her poetry. Her poem “Runs with Scissors” won the third-place prize in the Wyoming state poetry contest, and her “Christmas Eve” received second honorable mention. She also won second place in the Pennsylvania contest for environmental poems with “In the Everywhere.”
We don’t print much poetry, but we’re always glad to get Lynda’s prose, and we congratulate her.
Honored Writer
Allen Best, a frequent contributor to Colorado Central, was awarded the 2006 Morton Margolin Prize for Distinguished Business Reporting. The award, announced on Jan. 30, comes from the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business and School of Communications, and includes not just a plaque and a résumé enhancement, but also a $1,000 cash prize.
Best’s award came from his article “Thirst for Solutions,” published in the October, 2005, edition of ColoradoBiz Magazine. It examined the water demands of the metro region, especially Douglas County; demands that grow, even as the traditional supply of groundwater is being exhausted. We found it on-line at http://www.cobizmag.com/articles.asp?search=archives&id=270
The Margolin Prize was first awarded in 1980, following Margolin’s death in 1978. “Hailed by fellow reporters for his precise and ethical writing, Margolin was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and worked for the Associated Press, Colorado Business Magazine (the predecessor of ColoradoBiz), and the Rocky Mountain News, where he ended his distinguished career,” explained the DU College of Business.
Best, a native of Fort Morgan, began his journalistic career at his college newspaper, the Rocky Mountain Collegian at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.
His connection withColorado Central started long before the magazine did; in 1977 he went to work for Martha and Ed Quillen at the weekly Middle Park Times in Kremmling when they needed an editor.
Allen had been working on an oil survey crew in the Red Desert of Wyoming, and “of all the people we interviewed,” Martha recalls, “he was the only one who thought Kremmling looked pretty good, so we figured he’d stay for a while.”
He did, even after the Quillens sold the paper and moved on. He later edited the Winter Park Manifest in Grand County, and then the Vail Trail and the Vail Valley News in Eagle County. He free-lances now from his home-office in Arvada. He also produces the weekly Mountain Town News, which provides Colorado Central with interesting items from the resort belt.
Congratulations, Allen.
