This happened a couple of days ago now and we’re only just now getting around to blogging it, but we’re very excited to tell you that This Magazine has been nominated for three National Magazine Awards. Industry awards can be pretty inside-baseball, but this is an excellent opportunity to highlight a few of our many hardworking contributors who are receiving some special recognition from their journalist peers with these nominations. And it’s a chance for you to catch up on some of the compelling articles we published in 2009. The full list of nominees is available at the National Magazine Awards Foundation’s website, and we’d also like to give our congratulations to our fellow nominated small and independent magazines, including Geist, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, Spacing, Prefix Photo, Taddle Creek, AlbertaViews, The Ryerson Review of Journalism, Briarpatch, and Border Crossings (among others).

Here are the This nominees (drumroll please):

Katie Addleman was nominated in the Health & Medicine category for her feature story on drug legalization, “Addicted to failure” (which was a keystone of last November’s Legalize Everything! issue).

Morgan Dunlop was nominated in the Best New Writer category for “Gimme shelter,” her feature on undocumented migrants living in church sanctuary in Canada, and the work of those faith communities to reform our cumbersome immigration policies.

And illustrator Graham Roumieu was nominated in the “spot illustration” category (an illustration smaller than a full page) for this cheeky scene that accompanied Darryl Whetter’s column on the lack of sex in CanLit. Note that Graham is nominated four times in this category for three different publications. He’s a busy guy.

*Graham Roumieu may not be exactly as pictured.

Members of the Vibe Collective in the CIUT studios. From Left: Corey Dawkins, Chantelle Jaime, Michael Richard Lewis AKA Reality Architect, Jamaias DaCosta AKA Jams

We’ve done something a little different with Listen to This #008, bringing you a special hour-long conversation between several This Magazine contributors and Toronto’s Vibe Collective, a group of broadcasters who do a weekly mix of talk and music on CIUT 89.5 FM (available anywhere, anytime, at ciut.fm). Interviewers Jamaias DaCosta and Chantelle Jaime welcomed some writers who contributed to our November-December 2009 issue, “Legalize Everything,” on to the show to talk about the different legalization measures they had written about: Katie Addleman on legalizing drugs, Tim Falconer on assisted suicide, and Laura Kusisto on hate speech. This editor Graham F. Scott (uh, that’s me) was also there to chime in on the origins of the special issue and some of the thorny topics it tackled. It’s a lively, challenging conversation about some really fascinating topics. Running to one full hour, it’s longer than one of our usual podcasts, but we thought it was worth running the conversation in its entirety. The talk took place in mid-January 2010. Hope you enjoy it.