Nigerian Journalist Will Bring Her Reporting on Kidnapped Chibok Girls to Southern Illinois University

On Friday, April 25, 2025, Nigerian journalist and Pulitzer Center grantee Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani will join a daylong symposium on rebuilding local news at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Nwaubani’s Pulitzer Center-supported projects include Freed Chibok Girls Wed Boko Haram Militants who Abducted Them, her reporting on the kidnapped Nigerian girls and their lives once freed from their kidnappers, the terrorist group Boko Haram. Some of these young women are now married, with government permission, to the militants who held them in captivity.

Nwaubani will bring to SIUC her insights into local reporting from within her country and her more extensive international work, which has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Guardian. As a regular contributor to the BBC’s "Letter from Africa," her work often sheds light on the continent's overlooked humanitarian issues.

She also is an author. Her young adult novel, Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree, is based on interviews with girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. In addition, Nwaubani is participating this year in the Stigler Center Journalists in Residence Program at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, a program aimed at shaping the next generation of leaders in business reporting.

Other speakers at the SIUC symposium will include:

Sarah Blustain: assistant managing editor at ProPublica

Ruby Bailey: editor-in-chief at the Illinois Answers Project

Bob Rowley: lecturer at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and director at the Medill Illinois News Bureau