Kevin Blackistone

Kevin Blackistone is a longtime national sports columnist now at The Washington Post, a panelist on ESPN’s “Around the Horn,” a contributor to National Public Radio and coauthor of “A Gift for Ron,” a memoir by former NFL star Everson Walls published in November 2009 that details his kidney donation to onetime teammate Ron Springs. Blackistone was a sports columnist for AOL Fanhouse from 2007-11 and an award-winning sports columnist for The Dallas Morning News from 1990-2006.

In 1981, he started his career as a city reporter at The Boston Globe. In 1983, he moved to The Chicago Reporter, a monthly investigative magazine on Chicago’s racial and social issues. In 1986, Blackistone joined The Dallas Morning News as a general assignment reporter on the city desk before joining the business desk, where he covered economics. In 1990, after covering Nelson Mandela’s U.S. tour, Blackistone moved to the sports page where he covered every major event over the next 16 years.

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.”