Sweetland Center for Writing's Writer to Writer series lets you hear directly from University of Michigan professors about their challenges, processes, and expectations as writers and also as readers of student writing. Each semester, Writer to Writer pairs one esteemed University professor with a Sweetland faculty member for a conversation about writing. 

This month Writer to Writer welcomes Dr. Heather Ann Thompson. Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan in the Department of Afro-American and African Studies, the Department of History, and the Residential College. She is the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy (2016). Blood in the Water received six additional book awards and landed on over 20 best of 2016 book lists including that of the New York Times.

Thompson is also a public intellectual who writes regularly on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal justice system for The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and many other national publications.

This year, Thompson was awarded a Bearing Witness Writing Fellowship from the Art for Justice fund of the Ford Foundation. Her next book is on the MOVE bombing of 1985.

Writer to Writer takes place at the Literati bookstore (124 E. Washington) on Tuesday, November 27th from 7-8pm and is also broadcast live on WCBN radio (88.3FM). These conversations offer students a rare glimpse into the writing that professors do outside the classroom. You can hear instructors from various disciplines describe how they handle the same challenges student writers face, from finding a thesis to managing deadlines. Professors will also discuss what they want from student writers in their courses, and will take questions put forth by students and by other members of the University community. If there's anything you've ever wanted to ask a professor about writing, Writer to Writer gives you the chance.