Jennifer Berry Hawes is a reporter at ProPublica covering the South, currently writing about Hurricane Helene, including its impact and its aftermath.
Prior to ProPublica, she worked at The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, most recently as a watchdog and public service reporter. She was part of the team that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for public service for the series “Till Death Do Us Part,” which examined South Carolina’s failure to protect women from often-fatal domestic violence. She also was a 2019 Pulitzer finalist for feature writing, along with fellow reporter Deanna Pan, for their series “An Undying Mystery,” about the youngest person ever executed in South Carolina.
She also reported extensively on the Emanuel AME Church mass shooting in 2015, when a racist gunman murdered nine people during Bible study at one of the country’s oldest Black churches. Her 2019 book stemming from that reporting, “Grace Will Lead Us Home,” won the Christopher Award and Audie Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
She is based in South Carolina.
