New York Times Sidney Awards

At the end of each year, New York Times columnist David Brooks announces the Sidney Awards, which highlight the year’s best long-form essays.

Many of his 2020 selections honored the work of writers in the uppermost echelons of publishing: Hilton Als writing for The New Yorker, Ed Yong writing forThe Atlantic , and other heavy hitters at top-tier national publications.

So it was surprising and overwhelming to be acknowledged in such company for a story that has nothing to do with current events or all the complicated issues we faced in 2020. My Bicycling Magazine story about NOEL + LEON, a 6,000-word “true fable” likened by Lowell Thomas Award judges to “a Rudyard Kipling Tale from the exotic east,” somehow made this list.

“A man named Leon was 309 days into his westward cycling trek across Asia and through Europe, when suddenly in the deserts of Kazakhstan, he stumbled upon a man named Noel, nearly his own age, who was riding east from Europe and toward Asia,” Brooks wrote. “Kim Cross’s article, “What Happens When Two Strangers Trust the Rides of Their Lives to the Magic of the Universe,” in Bicycling magazine, is really about people who head out alone, with mediocre gear, to ride across two continents — the motives that drive them, the adventures that befall them.”

If you’re interested in story structure, the narrative architecture is a palindrome. Canadian author Eva Holland did an excellent analysis for Nieman Storyboard, Harvard University’s website dedicated to story craft. I also talked about the reporting and the structure on Gangrey, a podcast in which writing professor Matt Tullis interviews writers about the story behind the story.

I still haven’t achieved my goal of getting a byline in the New York Times, but I consider it even more of an honor to have my story noted there.