Former Monitor photographer Preston Gannaway earned New Hampshire its first Pulitzer Prize in journalism yesterday. Her winning photos chronicled the death of Carolynne St. Pierre, a Concord woman who wanted to leave her children with a record of her final months.

Multimedia presentation of the series.
The Pulitzer-winning photographs.

Gannaway and Monitor reporter Chelsea Conaboy spent two years with St. Pierre, her husband, Rich, and her three children, Melissa, Brian and Elijah. Between October 2006 and December 2007, the Monitor published five installations of the project, called "Remember Me," in its print edition and posted an 18-minute multimedia story on its website.

Last month, Gannaway left Concord for a job at The Rocky Mountain News in Denver, but she returned yesterday to celebrate. Over cake, champagne and sparkling cider, her co-workers lauded her photography and the compassion she brings to her work. The St. Pierre project, they said, is an example of the power of community journalism.

"There's no better piece of journalism than one that takes a family's story . . . and makes it into universal themes of struggle, grief, recovery, fragmentation," said Dan Habib, who was the Monitor's photo editor during Gannaway's time with the St. Pierres. "This is something that many, many families feel, whether it's with a death in the family, or a bankruptcy or a child with a disability."

Habib and Monitor editor Mike Pride thanked the St. Pierres for trusting Gannaway and Conaboy to see, and tell, the truth.

"It's that kind of trust that really allows us to do the kind of journalism that we do," Pride said.

Gannaway and Conaboy met the St. Pierres in early 2006, two years after Carolynne was diagnosed with liver cancer. They were there for holidays, for doctors' visits, when Carolynne died in February 2007 and in the months that followed.

"Rich is my hero," Gannaway said yesterday. "I just have so much respect for that family. No one's perfect, but it taught me so much about what family means, what life, what death, means."

Gannaway, 30, spent five years at the Monitor. Before that, she was an intern at papers in New Mexico and Maine. She holds a bachelor's degree in fine art photography from Virginia Intermont College. She's won many local and national awards for her work, including several prizes for photos of the St. Pierres. Her Pulitzer entry included 19 photos from 2007 and several supplemental images from the year before.

Pulitzer winners were announced yesterday afternoon at Columbia University in New York. Gannaway's prize in feature photography is the first Pulitzer awarded to a New Hampshire newspaper. Large, metropolitan papers typically dominate the 14 categories. The Monitor was the smallest paper to win this year.

Pride served as co-chairman of the Pulitzer board, and Habib was a member of the committee that selected three photo finalists from well over 100 entries. Both men stressed yesterday that Pulitzer rules prevented them from influencing how Gannaway's portfolio fared. Neither participated in the deliberation over her entry.

Pulitzers have been awarded for 92 years, and as former Monitor publisher Tom Brown explained, the prize is a big deal in journalism:

"It's like winning the Super Bowl. Or the Final Four," said Brown, who's now president and CEO of the Monitor's parent company, Newspapers of New England. "It's really an honor for the entire Monitor and shows the kind of journalism a family paper can bring to the community."

Three Monitor alumni also won Pulitzers yesterday: Alec MacGillis, Jo Becker and Steve Pearlstein, all of whom work at the Washington Post. MacGillis was part of the team that covered the Virginia Tech shooting. Becker won for a series of stories exploring Vice President Dick Cheney's influence on national policy. Pearlstein won for columns on the economy.

Gannaway learned that she'd won Friday night, just after she'd crossed the Nebraska-Colorado line. She was driving to her new home in Denver, where she had planned to unpack and start work at the News yesterday. Those plans were quickly changed, and she flew back to New Hampshire on Sunday, but not before calling Rich St. Pierre.

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