Contra Costa Times reporters Suzanne Bohan and Sandy Kleffman have won the Edgar A. Poe Award from the White House Correspondents’ Association for excellence in coverage of news of national or regional significance.

The Times reported that President Obama will present the award to Bohan and Kleffman at the association’s annual dinner in Washington on May 1.

The two were honored for their four-part series, “Shortened Lives: Where You Live Matters,” which delved into the reasons behind the striking gap in health and life expectancy between East Bay neighborhoods. The award was issued to the Contra Costa Times, and includes a $2,500 prize.

“Bohan and Kleffman stand conventional wisdom on its head, providing powerful evidence that variations in disease rates and life expectancies between neighborhoods “… are not — as widely assumed — the result of poor people making bad choices about diet and exercise,” the judges wrote. “Rather the discrepancies stem from multiple forces that deny those living in poor communities access to the basic resources necessary to engage in a healthy lifestyle, however great their desire to do so. (Photo credits: both by Dan Rosenstrauch, Contra Costa Times)