Pulitzer Prize Winner to Pen Series on Childhood Hunger for Maryland Matters

On Thursday, Maryland Matters will launch a ground-breaking, multi-part series on childhood hunger in Maryland.

The series, “Empty Plates at Maryland’s Table,” will take a look at an array of institutional impediments to ensuring Maryland children have adequate access to food: from low wages, to archaic rules on who qualifies for food stamps, to limitations on who can use school food pantries, to charities that perpetuate hunger in America — and so much more.

The series will also include a sobering look at major Maryland employers whose workers must use food stamps to feed their families.

The series is being written by Elliot Jaspin, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author who lives in Annapolis. He has been examining hunger in Maryland for more than a year.

Elliot Jaspin

Jaspin worked for over 40 years at newspapers in Pennsylvania, Maine, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C. He has also taught journalism at the University of Missouri and the University of Maryland.

In 1979, while a reporter at the Republican & Herald newspaper in Pottsville, Pa., Jaspin won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for stories on the destruction of a local coal company by men with ties to organized crime.

Jaspin founded the National Institute for Computer Assisted Report and was honored for his computer work by the National Press Foundation in 1994. In addition, he is the author of “Buried In The Bitter Waters: The Hidden History Of Racial Cleansing In America.”

Be sure to check out the series, beginning Thursday.

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