2021 Best of The 'Burgh

Voting is currently underway in Pittsburgh Magazine's annual Best of the 'Burgh. As I mentioned last month, I want to sincerely thank my friends and family for nominating me in the Local Writer category. I'm a finalist up against an impressive group of nominees in Damon Young, Gene Collier, Merecedes J. Williams, Natalie Bencivenga, and Tony Norman. All of these individuals have better credentials than me and get paid to share their opinions. If you've read this blog at all, you can tell that no one is paying to hear from me. 

Before I go any further, I should probably address something fairly important for this contest. I'm not a local writer. I mean, I'm a local writer for where I live, but that place isn't Pittsburgh or Western Pennsylvania. With that written, I was born and raised in Pittsburgh. Before the pandemic, I tried to get back at least once a year to visit family and friends and to expose my kids to Pittsburgh. I regularly write about Pittsburgh in posts including our family vacation, the closing of one of my favorite restaurants, The O, and predictions for the Pirates this season. My guess is that at least 1,000 of my over 3,000 blog posts here reference Pittsburgh. Historically, more people in Western Pennsylvania read my blog than from anyone else. I am also a proud member of the Pittsburgh Bloggers group on Facebook, and the majority of the people I follow on Twitter have Pittsburgh ties. In addition, I regularly visit blogs and websites devoted to Pittsburgh and listen to Pittsburgh podcasts. Basically, I believe that I have the credentials of a local writer except that I don't have a phone number with a 412 area code.

So this is the part of the post where I should encourage you to vote for me. If you'd like to, please do. However, any of the other nominees are deserving (and probably more deserving), so I'm not going to start a "None of the Above" campaign.

Voting concludes on Saturday, April 17th at 11:59 PM. The local writer category is under "Personalities." And thanks for checking out my third blog post in my 30 in 30ish challenge.