ITHACA, N.Y. -- Trey Graham, theater critic at the Washington City Paper , is the winner of the 2003-04 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. The award, which carries a $10,000 prize, is administered by the Cornell University Department of English and is one of the most generous and distinguished in the American theater. Graham was selected by a committee consisting of the chairs of the English departments of Cornell, Princeton and Yale universities, assisted by experts on the theater from those universities.

The Nathan committee citation reads: "For Trey Graham, the play's the thing. In reviewing classical and contemporary work produced in the Greater Washington D.C. area, he brings a fresh eye both to things we think we know and to things newly-minted. He writes with sensitivity and flair about the individual masterworks of the British and American canon, but he's especially adept at linking these and other works from the past with the best the present has to offer."

A onetime student of classical music and aspiring opera singer, Graham began his journalism career as a writer and editor at The Washington Blade and started writing for the City Paper in 1995. His five-year tenure at USA Today included a stint as the newspaper's music and theater editor. Graham is a regular panelist on "Around Town", the venerable arts roundtable program on Washington PBS affiliate WETA-TV, and an occasional contributor to WETA-FM's theater coverage. He also has been a weekend host on WGMS-FM, the capital district's commercial classical music radio station. Graham was a 2002 critic-fellow at the O'Neill Critics Institute and has been named a fellow at the first National Endowment for the Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater, to be convened at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School in February 2005. He also has been a guest lecturer on drama criticism at Georgetown University and is author of the theater section of the latest "Time Out Guide" to the nation's capital.

Past recipients of the Nathan Award have included Walter Kerr (1963) and Mel Gussow (1978) of The New York Times , Albert Williams (2000) of the Chicago Reader , Alisa Solomon (1998) of The Village Voice and Hilton Als (2003) of The New Yorker .