We’re having too much fun at Drew Magazine, and it appears it’s showing. The Washington, D.C.-based Council for the Advancement and Support of Education has just awarded us a gold medal for university magazines with circulations under 30,000 in its 2010 Circle of Excellence Awards national competition, or, as our boss Dave Muha calls it, the Academy Awards of college communications. (We tip our hat to our colleagues at the University of California-Berkeley and Cambridge University, who took home golds in the large-circulation category.)

We haven’t yet received the judges’ comments so we can’t be sure what about Drew Magazine grabbed them, but I’ll venture that much of the credit goes to Art Director Margaret Kiernan, whose design lifts every issue to the sublime. I’m also indebted to a talented corps of freelance writers, illustrators and photographers, production designer Melanie Shandroff, copyeditor Kristen Daily Williams C’98 and interns Michelle Caffrey C’10 and Samantha Pritchard C’10.

But I suspect what the judges picked up on is that Drew is a story-rich community; an editor’s dream, in other words. I’ll let Drew President Robert Weisbuch explain it in his eternally gracious way: “One of the things I feel when I read an issue is that it captures the spirit of our campus—the stories and achievements of our students, alumni, faculty and staff,” he says. “In this way, this award belongs to all of us.”—Renée Olson, Editor, Drew Magazine