WBEZ, Pulitzer Center Team Up To Amplify Youth Perspectives on the News

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The Pulitzer Center's Education team is excited to announce a collaboration with WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR news station and one of the largest and most respected public media stations in the country. This collaboration will connect Chicago-area youth to quality journalism and resources they can use to process news stories. It will also amplify youth perspectives on current events and global issues.

This announcement follows the recent launch of the Pulitzer Center’s 2025 Fighting Words Poetry Contest. Open to K-12 students worldwide, the contest invites young people to write original poems in response to Center-supported news stories. Their entries should include lines from news stories that inspire their poems.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, which takes place in April, WBEZ will feature short poetry readings and interviews with past contest winners from the Chicago area. Local students entering the contest this year may have the chance to be featured online or in an audio segment after the end of the 2025 contest. All entrants are also eligible for the prizes awarded by the Pulitzer Center, which include awards up to $300 and publication on the Center’s website.

WBEZ has produced several journalism projects supported by grants from the Pulitzer Center, including the recent Democracy Solutions Project. This project takes a solutions-oriented look at how other countries are managing immigration and voter turnout, and connects their approaches to Chicago’s local context. Chicago-area students participating in the Fighting Words Poetry Contest are encouraged to explore this project as inspiration for their poems. Stories include:

• Appropriate for grades 3 and up:
  • “Walking to the United States”
• Appropriate for grades 7 and up:
  • “What the U.S. Can Learn From How Australia Votes”
  • “In Toronto, Immigrants Find a Modern, Fast Employment System”
  • “Finding Refuge in Toronto”
• Appropriate for grades 9 and up:
  • “The View From Yuendumu: What an Australian Outlier Tells Us About Political Representation”
  • “What Colombia Can Teach Chicago About Managing a Migrant Wave”

The Pulitzer Center looks forward to reading students’ contest entries, and to sharing the winning poems with the world! The deadline to enter is Sunday, May 11, 2025. You can find complete contest information, including eligibility criteria, a judging rubric, and resources students and educators can use to help them write strong entries at www.pulitzercenter.org/poetrycontest.

Chicago teachers who are interested in sharing this contest opportunity with their students are invited to attend a free workshop on Saturday, April 12, 2025, 10:30am–12:00pm CDT. The workshop will be held in a hybrid format, and teachers are asked to RSVP to inform facilitators whether they will attend online or in person. Click here for more information and to register.