Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Tony Messenger is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s metro columnist, a position he’s held since September 2015. He was previously the editorial page editor at the Post-Dispatch and was hired at the paper in 2008 in the state capital bureau.
He began his career at a small weekly newspaper in Colorado, where he was born and raised. He has worked in Colorado, Arizona, Nebraska, South Dakota and Missouri at weeklies, dailies and magazines.
In 2019, Messenger won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for his series of columns on debtors’ prisons in Missouri. In 2016, Messenger was awarded a Missouri Honor Medal, the highest award bestowed by the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. That same year he won a National Headliner for editorial writing. In 2015, Messenger was a Pulitzer finalist for his series of editorials on Ferguson, and won the Sigma Delta Chi award for best editorials of the year, given by the Society of Professional Journalists.
His first book, Profit and Punishment: How America Criminalizes the Poor in the Name of Poverty, is being published by St. Martin’s Press and is due out by late 2021.
Messenger lives in Wildwood with his wife and two children. He has four grown children and eight grandchildren.