This year, the Joan Shaw Herman Award for Distinguished Service will be presented to Richard Read ’75. This award is given to a Concord Academy alum who displays exceptional dedication to serving others. This is CA’s only award and highest honor.
Joan Shaw Herman ’46, whom the award is named after, was the first recipient of this honor posthumously in 1976. Herman was paralyzed after contracting polio the summer after graduating from CA, confined to an iron lung for the rest of her life. Despite this setback, she continued to pursue her passion for art and strived to improve the lives of people with physical disabilities. This led her to found New Horizons, a community of disabled individuals who sought to live independent and dynamic lives. She became the vice president of its board and editor of its publication. Herman’s story is one of resilience, generosity, and a desire to better the lives of others. Her incredible impact attests to the power of service and exemplifies CA’s core values of empathy, integrity, and responsibility. The award, inspired by her journey, is rightfully named in her honor.
Read is an acclaimed journalist who has extended his skills to help communities on a global scale. Before journeying through an illustrious professional career, he first wrote at CA for this very newspaper, the Centipede. While attending Amherst College, he was the editor of their student newspaper. Since then, in his forty years of experience, he has reported on over sixty countries on all seven continents. Additionally, Read has also won two Pulitzer Prizes—the first for explaining Asia’s 1990 financial crisis by tracing the journey of a container of french fries, and the second for uncovering abuse in the United States Immigration Service.
Read has covered topics from the wars in Cambodia and Afghanistan, to the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, to the 2011 earthquake in Japan. He has reported from North Korea and detailed the economic opening of Russia and Vietnam. Read worked as a national reporter and bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, and a senior writer and foreign correspondent for The Oregonian. In 2020, through the LA Times, he released a story about a COVID-19 superspreader event that resulted in the deaths of two performing choral singers. This article attracted over 8 million views and convinced health officials to study the incident and realize that COVID-19 spread through the air. Scientists point to this event as a key example of airborne contamination and urged international health organizations to change their guidelines accordingly. He is retired as of 2021 and enjoys freelance writing and working on documentaries.
The CA community looks forward to welcoming Read back on campus on Friday, May 10 to hear his story. Please join us in congratulating him on this impressive honor!