Best-selling author Wil Haygood will discuss his new book, “Tigerland: 1968-1969: A City Divided, a Nation Torn Apart, and a Magical Season of Healing,” during a free community event Oct. 1 at Ohio Wesleyan University. Haygood, an award-winning journalist, is best known for his book, “The Butler: A Witness to History.”
Haygood will discuss “Tigerland” at 7 p.m. Oct. 1 in the Benes Rooms of Ohio Wesleyan’s Hamilton-Williams Campus Center, 40 Rowland Ave., Delaware. He will be interviewed during the 90-minute event by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gregory L. Moore, a 1976 OWU graduate and former editor of The Denver Post.
In a starred review, Kirkus describes Haygood’s newly released “Tigerland” as “a story of perseverance, courage, and breathtaking talent as he recounts, in vibrant detail, the achievements of the Tigers, a basketball and baseball team at Columbus, Ohio’s inner-city East High School. …
“The inspiring story of East High’s championship becomes even more astonishing,” Kirkus states, “in the context of endemic racism, which the author closely examines, and ‘the turmoil of a nation at war and in the midst of unrest,’ roiled by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. An engrossing tale of one shining moment in dark times.”
In its starred review, Booklist adds: “As in all his avidly read books, Haygood sets the stories of fascinating individuals within the context of freshly reclaimed and vigorously recounted African American history as he masterfully brings a high school and its community to life. This laugh-and-cry tale of rollicking and wrenching drama set to the beat of thumping basketballs and the crack of baseball bats, fast breaks and cheerleaders’ chants, is electric with tension and conviction, and incandescent with unity and hope.”
Haygood currently is a visiting distinguished professor at Miami University of Ohio. He worked as a journalist for nearly 30 years, at The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Haygood’s other books include “Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America”; “Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson”; and “In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr.,” recently optioned for a Hollywood film.
Haygood’s Ohio Wesleyan event is organized by the university’s Office of Multicultural Student Affairs, which takes the lead on providing support for students of marginalized identities, specifically students of color, LGBTQIA students, first-generation students, and low-income students. Learn more at www.owu.edu/omsa.
