Joanna Connors is a winner of the 2008 Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism from Northwestern University, and Columbia University’s Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma for “Beyond Rape: A Survivor's Story.” A reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, she wrote the series about her own 1984 rape, her struggles to survive the aftermath, and her resolution to track down her rapist 23 years later.
At the time of her rape, she was a film critic for the Plain Dealer, having arrived in Cleveland from Minneapolis less than a year before. A graduate of the University of Minnesota, where she met her husband, Connors began her journalism career at the Minneapolis Star (now Minneapolis Star-Tribune). She and her husband both left the Star when it was bought out, and at the time of her rape, he was also working for the Plain Dealer, on the police beat.
What started out as a series for the newspaper is now a memoir that is a must read for every woman who has ever been raped, who has feared being raped, or who has never even thought about being raped. And for every man who wants to understand or who cares about the women in his life—mothers, sisters, wives, or daughters. Because it is more than a story of rape. It is a story about our divides—of race, of education and opportunity, of prison, and of family.