Arnold Zwicky's Blog

News from the Linguistic Society of America:

Arika Okrent announced as winner of LSA Linguistics Journalism Award: Arika Okrent, the language columnist for Mental Floss and a frequent linguistic contributor to many publications, has been named this year’s recipient of the Linguistic Society of America’s Linguistics Journalism Award. The Linguistics Journalism Award, chosen annually by LSA officers and staff, honors the journalist whose work best represents linguistics over the previous 12 months.

Dr. Okrent’s work at Mental Floss is acclaimed for taking often-complex linguistic topics and making them easily accessible. Her use of innovative media forms such as listicles and whiteboard videos has helped bring linguistic knowledge to a wide audience. In addition to her work at Mental Floss, Dr. Okrent is editor-at-large at TheWeek.com and has written for publications including Smithsonian Magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, and Schwa Fire over the past year alone.

Dr. Okrent, who received her Ph.D. in linguistics and psychology from the University of Chicago, is also the author of In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamers who tried to Build a Perfect Language.

Okrent is the second-ever recipient of the Linguistics Journalism Award; journalist Ben Zimmer received the inaugural LJA in 2014.

Okrent has been cited a number of times on this blog, most recently in “On the conlang patrol” of 10/15/14.

xx

This entry was posted on October 23, 2015 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Awards, Linguistics in the media, Linguists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.