Mark Puente, an investigative reporter for The Baltimore Sun, has been nominated three times for a Pulitzer Prize. He covered St. Petersburg City Hall and real estate for the Tampa Bay Times. He previously was a crime and investigations reporter for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, where he won the Al Nakkula Award — the only national journalism award devoted to police reporting.  His 2014 “Undue Force” series on allegations of police brutality in Baltimore won the Institute on Political Journalism’s Clark Mollenhoff Award for Excellence in Investigative Reporting and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism's Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award for reporting on racial or religious hatred, intolerance or discrimination in the United States.  A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate, Puente grew up in Detroit and Cleveland and spent 14 years driving a tractor trailer before going to college.