Lee Hawkins is producing podcasts in partnership with American Public Media (APM) on the intergenerational effect of racial violence and racism on Black American families. He’s the author of the forthcoming book, NOBODY’S SLAVE: How Uncovering My Family’s s History Set Me Free (HarperCollins 2024). Hawkins is an O’Brien Fellow at Marquette University. He was a lead reporter on a Wall Street Journal team that was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a story about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in 2022. Also in 2022, he was the host and executive producer of Mayo Clinic’s “Rise for Equity” podcast, which featured interviews with the top health care and research professionals discussing issues concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Health Care field.

In 2021, he was a finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. He is a four-time winner of NABJ’s Salute to Excellence Award and received NYABJ’s Adam Clayton Powell Reporting Award. He was a WSJ reporter for 19 years and is also known for his on-camera interviews with influential newsmakers and icons. He was a 2018 Logan Nonfiction Fellow and received the 2017 National Fellowship from USC Annenberg’s Fund for Journalism on Child Well-Being for Reporting on Childhood Trauma. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a bachelor’s in political science, where he was editorial page editor of the Badger Herald student newspaper.