Alison Flowers

Alison Flowers is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist in Chicago and the founder of Spiralbound, a production company at the intersection of investigative journalism and immersive storytelling. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, TIME, The Intercept, The Village Voice, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Reader, and South Side Weekly, among others.

Flowers was part of the team that won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting and a Peabody Award for You Didn’t See Nothin. Her podcast Somebody, about the 2016 fatal shooting of Courtney Copeland, was a 2021 Pulitzer finalist and prompted an investigation by the Office of the Inspector General, which recommended disciplining officers and reviewing the Chicago Police Department’s directive on rendering aid. She co-produced the Showtime documentary 16 Shots, on the police killing of Laquan McDonald, which won the Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Documentary and earned a Peabody nomination. Her 2016 investigation into how Illinois’ felony murder law can obscure police misconduct contributed to a critical amendment of one of the most expansive felony murder statutes in the country, and her reporting has contributed to the release of two innocent people from prison. A two-time winner of the Hillman Foundation’s Sidney Award, she received the Innocence Network’s 2026 Jim Dwyer Award for Journalism.