Kevin Blackistone

Kevin Blackistone is an award-winning national sports columnist now at The Washington Post, a professor at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism, a panelist on ESPN’s Around the Horn, co-producer and co-writer of the award-winning 2022 documentary “Imagining the Indian: the Fight Against Native American Mascoting,” a contributor to National Public Radio, and coauthor of “A Gift for Ron,” a 2009 memoir by former NFL star Everson Walls about his kidney donation to a teammate.

Before writing at The Post, Blackistone was a sports columnist for AOL Fanhouse and The Dallas Morning News. He started his journalism career as a city reporter at The Boston Globe, an investigative reporter at The Chicago Reporter, and an economics reporter at the Dallas Morning News.

After covering Nelson Mandela’s U.S. tour, Blackistone moved to the Dallas Morning News sports page where since he has covered the Summer Olympics, the Super Bowl, Wimbledon, World Cups, the Tour de France, British Open, NBA Finals, Final Fours, national college football championships, NFL playoffs, Major League Baseball playoffs, world championship boxing and other events more than once.

For three years in the late 1990s, he also wrote the sports column at Emerge, a monthly review of politics and culture that Time magazine hailed as an “uncompromising voice that made [it] the nation’s best Black news magazine.”

Blackistone is a recipient of numerous awards for sports column, investigative reporting, and enterprise reporting. He was a National Media Fellow at the Arab American Media Society, a Davenport Fellow at the University of Missouri, a Wharton Business Journalism Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Martin Luther King Fellow at Boston University as a graduate student.

He has authored academic journal articles on sports film documentaries and on diversity in sports media. He is a founding board member of The Investigative Project on Race and Equity. He was a visiting lecturer at Beijing Sport University.