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 co-author of A Gift for Ron, a memoir by former NFL star Everson Walls published in November 2009 about his kidney donation to one-time teammate Ron Springs.
Blackistone has covered the Olympics, Super Bowl, Wimbledon, the World Cup, the Tour de France, the British Open, the NBA Finals, Final Four, national college football championship, NFL playoffs, Major League Baseball playoffs, world championship boxing matches and other events on multiple occasions.
Prior to its last issue in 2000, Blackistone 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, including awards for sports column writing from the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors, for investigative reporting from the Chicago Newspaper Guild, and for enterprise reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists. He was a Martin Luther King Fellow at Boston University as a graduate student.
He has authored academic journal articles on diversity in sports media and hagiography in sports film documentary. He was a visiting lecturer at Beijing Sport University in the summer of 2014.
Blackistone is currently a Professor of Practice at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland.