Tony Messenger is the metro columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 2019, Tony 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. He recently published his first book Profit and Punishment that digs deeper into the way America criminalizes the poor in the name of justice.