Staff Highlight: David Schwartz Receives Nevada Press Association Awards

Special Collections is excited to announce that our colleague, David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research, recently received two awards in the Nevada Press Association’s 2014 Better Newspaper contest, thanks to his work in Vegas Seven magazine.

Schwartz was recognized in the categories of Best Local Column for his bi-weekly Green Felt Journal and Best Feature Story for “The Book That Tried to End Vegas,” a look back on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris’s The Green felt Jungle. On the whole, Vegas Seven received 18 NPA awards this year, including a first-place General Excellence honor for urban weekly publications.

“I’m honored to be recognized by the Nevada Press Association,” says Schwartz. “I used a variety of sources from Special Collections, particularly in writing the Green Felt Jungle feature, and I’d like to thank everyone at Special Collections for their help and support.

“At Seven, Phil Hagen, who hired me, and Greg Blake Miller, who was my editor for the past few years, also deserve a lot of credit. They made it easy for me to focus on the writing. I’ve very proud to be part of the Seven team.”

This isn’t the first time Schwartz’s work has been noted by the NPA. He is a five-time award winner, and has established a record for highlighting interesting and thought-provoking elements of Las Vegas’s past and present, all of which showcase historical photographs and documents from UNLV Special Collections

His past research in Special Collections has yielded five critically-acclaimed books  that highlight the importance of our collections in scholarly research on gaming and Las Vegas: Suburban Xanadu: The Casino Resort on the Las Vegas Strip and Beyond (Routledge, 2003); Cutting the Wire: Gambling Prohibition and the Internet (University of Nevada Press,2005); Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling (Gotham Books, 2006 and Winchester Books, 2013); and Grandissimo: The First Emperor of Las Vegas: How Jay Sarno Won a Casino Empire, Lost It, and Inspired Modern Las Vegas (Winchester Books, 2013).

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