“Every generation you get a few writers with the engine of a 747 and the skill of a wizard. There is one Wright Thompson. And we are so lucky he loves Mississippi. Reporting and reckoning can get no better, or more important, than this.”

— Kiese Laymon

Widely regarded as one of the nation’s leading sports journalists, Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN, an Emmy Award-winning reporter, and the executive producer of the TV show TrueSouth. He is the author of several bestselling books including Pappyland, about the storied whiskey distillery, and, most recently, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, a New York Times bestseller that confronts the haunting legacy of Emmett Till’s killing.

A Mississippi native, Thompson is at heart a southern storyteller who believes that understanding the place one lives is both an obligation and an act of love. By exploring foodways, beliefs, identities, and histories—both remembered and forgotten—he seeks to reveal the truths of the region he calls home.

In The Barn, Thompson reckons with the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, the failure to bring his slayers to justice, and the global forces that caused the tragedy to play out the way it did. While the event stoked national outrage and catalyzed the Civil Rights Movement, it has also been shrouded in secrecy and misinformation.  Over the years this brutal history has largely disappeared from the public consciousness, particularly in Mississippi Delta communities surrounding the site of the lynching. Thompson himself—whose family farm was located just 23 miles from the barn where Till died—only learned about it after he left the state for college.

It is this erasure—and the context for this brutality—that Thompson sets out to rectify, believing it is our obligations as Americans to remember and ask: “What if we knew the truth? What if we told the truth?”

 “Wright Thompson takes up one of the most consequential and tragic events of the twentieth century, the murder of Emmett Till, in the place where it happened. The land, the people, and circumstance are vivid on every page… Thompson teaches us that history is the most important ghost story there is to tell, and that we—the haunted—must be healed.” 

— Imani Perry, National Book Award-winner

The Barn is about the murder of a child, but it is also the history of Mississippi, money, property, power, and white supremacy—and the legacy of a brutal economic system that implicates all of us. “The reason there was racial violence in Mississippi is because investors in boardrooms in New York and in London and in Manchester and Liverpool wanted their ten percent and didn’t care how they got it,” Thompson asserts. “You cannot tell the story of the caste system and race in Mississippi, and therefore in America, without also telling the story of capitalism and global commodity chains.”

“I genuinely believe that everybody who reads [The Barn] will fundamentally understand our country better and also understand how the mapping of this one crime offers a map back into the light.”

— Wright Thompson

Thompson’s deep knowledge about and love of the South is the through-line for much of his work. His bestseller Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last delves into the evolution and lore of one of world’s most revered bourbons, Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve. Part history, part family saga, part memoir, it is a multifaceted window into Southern identity and the bourbon industry, as well as the fabled brand itself. He is also the executive producer of the documentary series TrueSouth, which explores food to illuminate regional Southern cultures and identities. Now in its seventh season, it streams on Hulu and the SEC Network.

But it is for his sports writing that Thompson is most widely known. With a large and devoted readership for his definitive portraits of titans like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, he has guest edited The Best American Sports Writing a dozen times and penned some of the most read articles in ESPN’s history, many of which are included in his first bestseller, The Cost of These Dreams.

A sought-after speaker, Thompson shares insights on sports, bourbon, southern culture, and the importance of reckoning with history to better understand our country and the places we call home. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Esquire, and Oxford American. He lives in Mississippi with his family.

For more information on Wright Thompson, please visit him on Instagram and at http://www.wrightthompson.com/.