Accomplished journalist and award-winning author Wil Haygood grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and entered Miami University in 1972. As in high school, Haygood was determined to earn a spot on Miami's basketball team, and during the 1973–1974 season, he was a proud member of the Miami University junior varsity team. Wil graduated from Miami in 1976 with a degree in urban planning, but exhibiting a knack for storytelling early on, he began in journalism at the Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette and two years later, moved to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

In 1984, Haygood became a staff writer at the Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and remained there several years before becoming a writer for the Washington Post in 2002. As an investigative reporter, Haygood traveled all over the world, including France, Germany, India, South Africa, where he witnessed Nelson Mandela's liberation from prison, and Somalia, where he was kidnapped and ransomed by rebels.

In 2008 during his time at the Washington Post, Haygood wrote his article, "A Butler Well Served by This Election," which became the basis for the 2013 award-winning motion picture "The Butler," directed by Lee Daniels and starring Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey.

Prior to Tigerland, Haygood authored seven nonfiction books, including prize-winning and critically acclaimed biographies of 20th-century figures: Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America, King of the Cats: the Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., In Black and White: the Life of Sammy Davis Jr., and Sweet Thunder: the Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson. His other books are Two on the River, about a 2,500-mile journey down the Mississippi River, and The Haygoods of Columbus, a family memoir.

Among his journalism honors are the National Headliner Award, the New England Associated Press Award, the Sunday Magazine Editors Award, the Paul L. Myhre Single Story Award, the Virginia Press Association Award and the National Association of Black Journalist Award for both feature writing and foreign reporting, among others. -miamioh.edu/tigerland/haygood

Emily was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her book, Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, won the 2019 LA Times Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Emily lives in South Burlington, Vermont.