Erisa Apantaku (born 2014) wins Pulitzer Prize for podcast about a hate crime

Apantaku's podcast examined systemic racism in Chicago using a hate crime in 1997

Another success for humanities education: Erisa Apantaku (graduated in 2014) can possibly attribute her career—winning a Pulitzer Prize and a Peabody Award—to the university's distribution requirements.

“I really liked that we had to take courses outside of our major,” says the ecology and evolutionary biology major. “Every semester I would think, 'Oh, what sales requirement do I have to do this time?' And then I saw this course being offered and I just thought, 'Oh, that's interesting.'” The course in question was an audio journalism course taught by NPR producer Steve Drummond, and it opened new doors for Apantaku's career.

Although she thought she could become a doctor, after graduating, Apantaku decided not to take the MCAT, instead choosing to teach science at an elementary school in Taiwan. “When I was there, it was just a great opportunity to learn and explore what I actually wanted to do.”

Apantaku bought a microphone and a recorder and began interviewing people she met in Taiwan. She edited the interviews in the style of “Love and Radio,” a storytelling podcast that launched in 2005. When she moved back to Chicago after teaching, she decided to keep writing and sharing stories, so she began volunteering for a local newspaper called Southside weekly and restarted her podcast.

“I fought my way through Chicago and put together a weekly radio show with different segments – interviews – every week for a year. It was exhausting,” she says. But the hard work paid off.

Southside weekly shared the office with the Invisible Institute, and the nonprofit journalism production company recruited her as a fellow before hiring her full-time. In the summer of 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests began across the country, Apantaku was assigned to a team project to help Yohance Lacour, a former imprisoned journalist, tell his story.

In “You Didn't See Nothin,” Lacour revisits a 1997 hate crime in Chicago in which a black boy was beaten by a group that included the son of a powerful white man with ties to powerful black leaders in the community. Apantaku notes that the podcast goes deeper than the usual flashy true crime podcast, shining a spotlight on systemic racism in Chicago and the impact of that dynamic on the black community there.

“It's not just about this kind of sensational story – we really try to talk about big issues like reconciliation and forgiveness,” Apantaku says of the podcast. “I like that we don't just admit defeat and say, 'Oh, that's a bad guy, that's a good guy.' It's like, 'No, they're all just complicated people.'”

Apantaku says the biggest test for “You Didn't See Nothin” was how it resonated with Black Chicagoans, and she was happy that they “loved” the final product. Critics agreed, recognizing the limited series on numerous “Best Podcasts of 2023” lists and awarding it the coveted Pulitzer Prize and Peabody Award this spring. Apantaku says the recognition — that the committees of these important awards appreciated the team's approach to storytelling — felt “amazing.”

Apantaku says she encourages aspiring journalists to be curious and listen to the people around them without prejudice. “I just wish we could all look at each other with more nuance, because there's so much story in a person's life,” she says, adding that she believes everyone has an “amazing story.” “As we explore in the podcast, everyone is so complicated, and I think you really have to listen – and do it without prejudice, just with an open mind.”