About Heather Ann Thompson
Thompson recently served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the U.S. and serves as well on the boards of several policy organizations including the Prison Policy Initiative the Eastern State Penitentiary, a historic site, and on the advisory boards of Life of the Law. She also works in an advisory capacity with the Center for Community Change and the Open Society Foundation on issues related to work. On the scholarly front, Thompson recently was honored to be named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians and, in addition to recently completing Blood in the Water: the Attica Prison uprising of 1971 for Pantheon books, Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City as well as the edited collection, Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s. She has also consulted on several documentary films including Criminal Injustice at Attica. In 2015 Thompson joins the faculty at the University of Michigan
