Heather Ann Thompson


Heather Ann Thompson is an American historian, author, activist, professor, and speaker from Detroit, Michigan. She won the 2017 , the 2016 Bancroft Prize, and myriad other prestigious honors for her work Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.

Early life

Thompson was born in Lawrence, Kansas. Her parents are Ann Curry Thompson, a labor lawyer in Detroit, and Frank Wilson Thompson, Jr, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan and Summer School lecturer at Harvard University. Her sister is Saskia Thompson. Thompson's early childhood was spent in Bloomington, Indiana and Oxford, England, but in her teen years the family moved to the North Rosedale Park neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan. Thompson graduated from Cass Technical High School.

Career

Thompson earned a bachelor's and master's degree from the University of Michigan and completed her PhD at Princeton University. Thompson was on faculty at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte from 1997-2009, and then on the faculty of Temple University in Philadelphia from 2009-2015. In 2015, Thompson returned to the Detroit area when she and her husband, accepted faculty positions at the University of Michigan. Thompson writes about the history and current crises of mass incarceration for numerous popular and scholarly publications. Her work can be found in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Jacobin, NBC, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, Salon, Huffington Post, and Dissent. She has also appeared on NPR, Sirius Radio, and various television news programs in the U.S. and abroad. Several of Thompson's scholarly pieces, including "Why Mass Incarceration Matters," have won best article awards, and her popular piece in The Atlantic, "How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America," was named a finalist for the Best Media Award given by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. Thompson was a Soros Justice Fellow, she founded the Carceral State Project and Documenting Criminalization and Confinement research initiative at the University or Michigan, she sits on the board of myriad organizations, and is a member of the standing Committee in Law and Justice at the National Academies. She served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel to study causes and consequences of incarceration in the U.S. Her books include: Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Rebellion of 1971 and its Legacy ; Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City ; and the edited collection, Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Thompson was also named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians.

The Attica Uprising of 1971

The culmination of more than a decade of research, Blood in the Water offers the first definitive account of the 1971 Attica Prison riot. The book was released in August 2016 to coincide with the forty-fifth anniversary of the country's largest prison rebellion and will shed new light on the riot, the state's violent response, and the decades-long implications of Attica for those involved as well as America's criminal justice system. Thompson's research for the book included interviews with former Attica prisoners, hostages, families of victims, lawyers, judges, law enforcement, and state officials as well as significant amounts of material never before released to the public.

History of Detroit and the Present Day Motor City

Heather Ann Thompson's 2001 book, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City is a regularly cited account of History of Detroit during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. It is a comprehensive account of police brutality and the black political reaction to it in this period, as well as the underlying reasons for why Detroit became such a crucial site of black political activism and black political power after 1973. This book was published by Cornell University Press and a new edition of it in 2017 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Detroit riot of 1967. This updated edition addressed issues currently facing Detroit as well such as its recent bankruptcy and the current challenges this city faces thanks to record rates of incarceration.

Publications

Books