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Heather Ann Thompson is a history professor in Ann Arbor. (C-Span video image)
Heather Ann Thompson, a former Detroiter who's a historian at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, adds another prestigious honor to the acclaim for her book, "Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy."
She wins this year's history book Pulitzer Prize, Columbia University announces Monday afternoon in New York. A $15,000 check makes the glory even sweeter.
The critically lauded best-seller is the first definitive account of a New York prison takeover and the state's bloody response. Last month, also at Columbia, its author won a Bancroft Prize -- considered one of the most prestigious honors in American history.
Her book was a National Book Award finalist and appeared on at least 14 best books of 2016 lists, her website says.
Pulitzer jurors say Thompson "sets high standards for scholarly judgment and tenacity of inquiry in seeking the truth about the 1971 Attica prison riots."
She earned a bachelor's and master's degree from the University of Michigan in 1987 and has a 1995 doctorate from Princeton University. She joined her alma mater's faculty in July 2015.
Her parents are Ann Curry Thompson, a labor lawyer in Detroit, and Frank Wilson Thompson, Jr, a professor of economics at the same campus where she teaches. "Always a Detroiter" says the new Pulitzer winner's Twitter bio.
Her 752-page book is about an upstate New York prison takeover that ended with 43 deaths - including those of 33 guards and other employees, some shot by state troopers sent in by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. Thompson reveals crimes committed during the uprising and its aftermath, who committed them and how they were covered up.
The author's comprehensive research includes interviews with former Attica prisoners, hostages, families of victims, lawyers, judges, law enforcement and state officials as well as significant amounts of material never before released. Her text says:
One might well wonder why it has taken 45 years for a comprehensive history of the Attica prison uprising of 1971 to be written," her text says. "The answer is simple: the most important details of this story have been deliberately kept from the public. Literally thousands of boxes of documents relating to these events are sealed or next to impossible to access.
Thompson has written extensively about policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal justice system.
A 2004 book, "Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City," is being reissued this year as an updated edition to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Detroit's riot.
Wikipedia describes it as "a regularly cited account of Detroit’s history during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s" and adds:
It is a comprehensive account of police brutality and the black political reaction to it in this period, as well as the underlying reasons for why Detroit became such a crucial site of black political activism and black political power after 1973..
