Dr. Heather Ann Thompson Biography

Dr. Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan and the author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize (Pantheon Books, 2016). Blood in the Water was awarded the Ridenhour Prize, the J. Willard Hurst Prize, the Public Information Award from the New York Bar Association, the Law and Literature Prize from the New York County Bar Association, the Media for a Just Society Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, and a rare Honorable Mention for the Silver Gavel Award from the American Psychiatric Association. Blood in the Water was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award and was longlisted for the Cundill Prize in History. Blood in the Water was reviewed and covered in four separate parts of the New York Times upon its debut, and Thompson herself was interviewed in the highly sought “Talk” section of the New York Times Magazine. The New York Times Most Notable Books of 2016 list, as well as those published by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, and others, included Blood in the Water on fourteen “Best of 2016” lists. Thompson appeared on over 25 television shows, including PBS Newshour, CBS Sunday Morning, and The Daily Show, as well as over 50 radio programs, including Sirius and NPR, to promote the book. Blood in the Water was optioned by TriStar Pictures within a week of its publication and will be adapted for film by celebrated screenwriters Anna Waterhouse and Joe Shrapnel, as well as produced by award-winning producers Amy Pascal and Rachel O'Connor. Heather Ann Thompson's fan base is far larger than her work in Blood in the Water. In 2001, she released Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City, which was reissued in 2017 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Detroit Rebellion. Her views on the issue have been included on a variety of local programs, a national news show, CSPAN, two CNN documentaries, and the award-winning film Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win. Thompson is also a public intellectual who contributes to The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Jacobin, The Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, NBC, New Labor Forum, The Daily Beast, and The Huffington Post, among other publications, on the history of policing, mass incarceration, and the current criminal justice system. “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in the Postwar United States,” Journal of American History (December 2010) and “Rethinking Working Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards,” Journal of American History (December 2010) are two of her award-winning scholarly articles. Labor: Studies in the History of the Working Class in the Americas (Fall, 2011). Thompson was a nominee for a best magazine article award in 2014 for his work in the Atlantic Monthly on how mass imprisonment has damaged democracy in America. Thompson received a year-long fellowship from Harvard University's Charles Warren Center in 2017 and a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Ford Foundation in 2018. Thompson was also asked to be the Writer in Residence in the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government for the academic year 2018-2019, but she was unable to accept at the time. Thompson was a member of a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon group that looked at the causes and effects of mass imprisonment in the United States. The National Institute of Justice and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation funded the two-year, $1.5 million research. Thompson has also served on the boards of the Prison Policy Initiative and the Eastern State Penitentiary, a historic site, as well as the advisory boards of Life of the Law and the Alliance of Families for Justice. She has also served as an adviser to the Humanities Action Lab Global Dialogues on Incarceration and the Center for Community Change. Thompson recently joined the Ford Foundation's Art for Justice Fund's advisory board and co-founded the University of Michigan's new Carceral State Project, which includes the Documenting Criminalization and Confinement research program. Thompson was elected President-elect of the Urban History Association in 2016, and the Organization of American Historians named her a Distinguished Lecturer in 2012. She currently edits a manuscript series for UNC Press called Justice, Power, and Politics with Rhonda Y. Williams (Case Western Reserve). She is also the series' sole editor for Routledge's American Social Movements of the Twentieth Century. Thompson has consulted on several documentaries, including Criminal Injustice at Attica, and assisted with others, including one on criminalization in America by BlueSpark Collaborative filmmakers Annie Stopford and Llewellyn Smith, another produced by Henry Louis Gates for PBS called And Still I Rise: Black Power to the White House and one that will be released soon on the Bar Association.

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