Epoch Times reporter Darlene McCormick Sanchez won an honorable mention for her feature writing portfolio in the Society of Features Journalism’s Excellence-in-Features contest on June 9.
The national contest has championed the craft of feature journalism since 1988 and drew close to a thousand entries this year from newsrooms large and small across the country.
In total, the Society of Features Journalism recognized close to fifty newspapers, magazines, and digital publications for excellence in storytelling across print, web, podcast, and video.
Sanchez, a senior Epoch Times reporter covering Texas politics and immigration, has a passion for traveling the country and documenting profound challenges faced by ordinary American people.
“That’s what I’m looking for when I do features,” she said in an interview. “The human capacity to come back from adversity, or to struggle and win at all odds—I love those types of stories.”
Last year, she returned to the hard-hit Yancey County, North Carolina, one year after Hurricane Helene, and surveyed the slow but sure recovery. She also traveled to a fourth-generation family farm in southeastern Arkansas and documented how legal Mexican workers via the H-2A visa program—despite its high costs and inflexible rules—kept the business going.
In addition, she crisscrossed West Virginia, the epicenter of the fentanyl crisis, for three days and spoke to people about their stories of loss and addiction—but also of hope.
“That story meant a lot to me,” Sanchez said. “I have family members and friends struggling with addiction, and that area of West Virginia is close to where I grew up in Tennessee. There is a lot of poverty, a lot of hopelessness, and I think that drives people there to seek out relief, to self-medicate.”
“So when I went back to do that story, it just brought all that back how much of a struggle it is, and how much fentanyl and drug abuse has taken hold of some of these rural places in America where the folks are so forgotten.”
Sanchez grew up with a love for writing and earned her journalism degree at the University of Houston. In her first reporting job at Waco Tribune Herald in central Texas, Sanchez, along with her colleague, Mark England, broke the story about the now-infamous Branch Davidian cult.
Their seminal seven-part investigative series was a 1994 Pulitzer Prize finalist in investigative reporting.
“I’ve done a lot of investigative reporting, but I have also tried to combine that with good writing,” Sanchez said, adding that she is a perpetual student in the craft of feature journalism.
“A good story is probably, to me, the highest calling of a journalist, because you have to engage your readers—if you don’t engage your readers, and they don’t want to finish the story, then what good is it?”
Sanchez’s winning portfolio features original photography by John Fredricks and Samira Bouaou.
