Leonora LaPeter Anton

An American Journalist

Leonora LaPeter Anton is a versatile writer with a passion for narrative nonfiction, explanatory reporting and investigative journalism. For 36 years, she was a staff writer at five southeastern newspapers, including more than two decades at the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times). As an enterprise reporter, she wrote narrative and explanatory journalism that often focused on underserved communities and unjust systems. As an independent journalist, she received IRE’s 2023 Freelance Fellowship. Her stories have explored themes around criminal justice, true crime, aging, divorce, poverty, drug addiction and mental health. She followed a surrogate mother who couldn’t get pregnant, a single mother living in a motel with her 4-year-old son, a couple stranded in court during a five-year divorce. Other stories explored a little-known Florida lynching, a man’s last days inside a psychiatric hospital, a woman going back for therapy four decades after she was gang-raped.

She has won a number of national journalism awards, including for feature reporting, deadline reporting, in-depth reporting and investigative reporting. In 2012, she was awarded the Paul Hansell Distinguished Journalism Award, which recognizes overall excellence in reporting and writing for a body of work in Florida. Leonora was also part of a three-person team that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for a series about violent conditions inside Florida’s psychiatric hospitals.

Leonora grew up in New York and Connecticut but spent much of her childhood in Athens, Greece, where her archaeologist Mom worked at an ancient burial ground. Leonora studied journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and got her first job in Okeechobee, Fl, as a reporter covering courts, cops and city government. At the Island Packet on Hilton Head Island, she wrote about the environment and health and became a city editor. She returned to reporting two years later as a higher education reporter at the Tallahassee Democrat in Tallahassee and, later, as a court reporter at the Savannah Morning News in Savannah, Ga. She moved to the Tampa Bay Times in 2000, the year she won the American Society of News Editors award for deadline reporting.  She is also the reporter and host of an 11-part podcast called “Blood and Truth,” about a man on death row for 48 years who claimed he was innocent but couldn’t get Florida prosecutors to allow him to test the evidence in his case. Until recently.

 Outside of work, Leonora loves reading, traveling and spending time outdoors, whether it’s near the water or in the mountains. She lives in a bungalow in St. Petersburg, Fl., with her husband, two cats and a dog.