WRIGHT THOMPSON is a senior writer for ESPN and an Emmy Award-winning reporter. He is the author of Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business, and his latest book, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his family.

WHY THEY’RE JOINING US

The Barn – a shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till and the decades-long cover-up of the crime – is a book that in many ways award-winning author Wright Thompson was preparing to write all his life. Thompson’s family farm, in the Mississippi Delta, sits just 23 miles from the site where Till was tortured and killed; that geography, and its graveyard of half-buried ghosts, are the soil he was raised on. The Barn is not only essential history and brilliant journalism, it also carries the emotional nuance and impact of a great novel. To quote Shonda Rhimes: “It literally changed my outlook on the world.”

Photo credit – Evan France