Citation
Rukmini Maria Callimachi spent a year in New Orleans chronicling the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for the Associated Press. Her articles artfully captured the challenges confronting a city struggling to reclaim its spirit. She wrote about a three-year-old child who rode out Katrina's waves inside a cooler and is now terrified of taking baths. She wrote about the arrival of the new phonebook as a mark of how much things had changed. (The number of pages listing contractors had more than doubled from the year before, while the number of 'Beauty Salon' listings was down 42 percent.) And she wrote about how, amid all of the destruction and despair, the wedding business in New Orleans was booming. "It reminds me of Valentine's Day," a marriage license clerk told her. "Except it's like Valentine's Day all the time."

Excerpt
The Children of the Storm
April 23, 2006
For adults, the hurricane's damage is the twisted houses, ripped from their foundations, and such things as bloated couches, spit out onto the street.
For their children, it's the muddy teddy bear and the headless stuffed rabbit, poking out of the rubble of one ruined house. It's the baby doll lying in another heap, her arms raised above her head, as if waiting to be picked up. It's the stuffed frog impaled on a radiator fan and the alphabet magnets still adhering to the side of a toppled refrigerator.
A beloved toy is much more than a physical object for a child.
"If you lose a favorite teddy bear, you haven't just lost a toy. You've lost one of the means by which you keep yourself feeling safe," says Dr. Claude Chemtob, a clinical professor of psychology and pediatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
But the loss extends far beyond their favorite teddy bear.
For Katrina's children, their destroyed homes have become their Ground Zero. They go back again and again, sifting through the rubble, looking for tiny pieces of their rooms. They mourn each destroyed toy, each fragment of a school art project, each mottled action figure.
Objects that were insignificant before the storm have become loaded with meaning.
Like the pink, plastic barrette 10-year-old Jasmine Lombard found on the dank carpet of her flooded room. It's the kind sold by the dozen for $3.99 at the corner grocery.
Returning for the first time, Jasmine spotted the barrette and picked it up. She held it close in her cupped hands, as if she'd stumbled across a family heirloom. "This is the only memory I have of this entire neighborhood," she says.
Some kids-like 6-year-old Michael Watts, Jasmine's next-door neighbor-are taking matters into their own hands. As the storm approached, he did what his parents told him: Pack a single bag. Don't take more than a few days' worth of clothes.
He returned to find his toys caked in mud.
That's when he asked his parents for a suitcase, one with wheels and a handle. In it, he began storing every new toy he was given since the storm.
Now, he doesn't let the suitcase out of his sight, lugging it behind him on errands, to the store, to restaurants and to sleep-overs. Inside are his treasures: Sponge Bob and Batman. A Game Boy. A growing collection of plastic, Hulk-like men.
It annoys his grandmother, Deirdre Domino. No more taking the suitcase to school, she says.
"I tell him, 'Michael, take out a few and take them with us,'" Domino says. "He says 'Mawmaw, what if we have another hurricane?'"

Biography
Rukmini Callimachi began reporting out of Dakar, Senegal, as one of the West African correspondents for The Associated Press in late 2006. Before that, she spent a year in New Orleans documenting the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She joined the AP in Portland, Ore., in 2003. Her reporting has won the Templeton Religion Story of the Year award and the Associated Press Managing Editors' Charles Rowe Award. She began her career as a freelancer for Time magazine in New Delhi, India. Born in Bucharest, Romania, Callimachi graduated with honors from Dartmouth College and completed her masters in linguistics at Exeter College, Oxford. Her poetry has been published in more than 20 journals, including The American Scholar. In 2000, she co-led the Royal Geographical Society of London's expedition to Tibet.