The Sun took four awards for feature writing in a contest sponsored by the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors. Abigail Tucker, 26, won three awards for articles published last year. Stephen Kiehl, 30, also won an award from the organization, which was founded in 1947 and is based at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
The Sun competed among newspapers with daily circulation of 175,001 to 300,000. In all, 1,371 entries were judged from around the country.
Tucker won first place in the general features category for her account last Dec. 31, titled "Two brothers make a family," of teenage boys who learned to depend on each other after their parents had died. She won another first-place award, in the feature specialty category, for a trio of stories about family: the piece about the brothers as well as a July 30 story, "Linked in Life and in Death," about a couple who, after being married 60 years, died 36 hours apart. Also included was a story from June 4, 2006, "A Daughter's Difficult Journey," about a young woman in search of her mother. That piece also took second place in the contest's narrative feature category.
Kiehl won third place in the arts and entertainment feature group for a March 31, 2006, story about a long-lost tape of a reading by the poet Anne Sexton, made days before she committed suicide in 1974.
nick.madigan@baltsun.com