Biography
Dr. Heather Ann Thompson is the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon Books, 2016). Blood in the Water also won 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 for Crime and Delinquency, and received a rarely-given Honorable Mention for the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association. Blood in the Water was also long listed for the Cundill Prize in History, and was a finalist for the National Book Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Upon its release Blood in the Water was prominently reviewed and profiled in the New York Times in four different sections, and Thompson herself was profiled in the highly-coveted "Talk" section in the New York Times Magazine. Blood in the Water ultimately landed on fourteen "Best of 2016" lists including the New York Times Most Notable Books of 2016 list, and ones published by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, and others. The book also received rave reviews in over 100 top popular publications, and Thompson appeared on over 25 television shows, including PBS Newshour, CBS Sunday Morning and the Daily Show, as well as on over 60 radio programs, including Sirius and NPR.
Within the first week of its publication Blood in the Water was optioned by TriStar Pictures and will be adapted for film by acclaimed screenwriters Anna Waterhouse and Joe Shrapnel and produced by award-winning producers Amy Pascal and Rachel O'Connor.
Heather Ann Thompson's audience goes well beyond her work in Blood in the Water. She also wrote the book Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City in 2001 which was republished in 2017 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Detroit Riot of 1967. Her commentary on that subject landed her on numerous local broadcasts, on a national news program, on CSPAN, and on two CNN documentaries.
Thompson is also a public intellectual who writes extensively on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal justice system for 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, as well as for the top publications in her field.
