Wil Haygood

Wil Haygood is a journalist and an author. In 1984, Haygood became a staff writer at The Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and remained there for several years before becoming a writer for The Washington Post in 2002. As an investigative reporter, Haygood traveled all over the world, including France, Germany, India, South Africa, where he witnessed Nelson Mandela's liberation from prison, and Somalia, where he was kidnapped and ransomed by rebels.

In 2008 during his time at The Washington Post, Haygood wrote his article, "A Butler Well Served by This Election," which became the basis for the 2013 award-winning motion picture The Butler directed by Lee Daniels and starring Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey.

Haygood has authored 10 nonfiction books. He has written critically acclaimed biographies of 20th-century figures, including Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America (2016) and In Black and White: the Life of Sammy Davis Jr. (2020). His other books include Two on the River (1988), about a 2,500-mile journey down the Mississippi River, The Haygoods of Columbus (2016), a family memoir; and The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home (2026), which has been longlisted for the National Book Award.

Among his journalism honors are the National Headliner Award, the New England Associated Press Award, the Sunday Magazine Editors Award, the Paul L. Myhre Single Story Award, the Virginia Press Association Award and the National Association of Black Journalist Award for both feature writing and foreign reporting.

A Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Haygood is currently Boadway Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Miami University in Ohio.