On the Same Page with John Jeremiah Sullivan

When John Jeremiah Sullivan learned that his sportswriter father's most memorable moment was at the horse races, he began a two-year study of the sport and the animal to write Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son. The book is an expansion of his 2002 cover story for Harper's Magazine, Horseman, Pass By, which won a National Magazine Award and the Eclipse Award.

Sullivan, a former editor and essayist for Harper's, recently visited Little Rock for the Arkansas Literacy Council's literary festival shared his reasons for writing the book and opinion of the finished product with OTSP guest interviewer Rex Nelson. Nelson serves as director of policy and communications for Gov. Mike Huckabee. The interview was taped at Lorenzen and Co. Booksellers in Little Rock.

The panel of readers discussing Blood Horses with host Tommy Sanders includes: Marc Smirnoff, publisher and editor of Oxford American and Arkansas Literary Festival consultant; Janie Ginocchio, freelance writer and Arkansas Literary Festival talent committee member; and musician and freelance writer Jason Morphew, who reviewed Blood Horses for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

About the Author

John Jeremiah Sullivan was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1974 and graduated from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1997. He began his publishing career as an editorial assistant at The Sewanee Review before becoming an Oxford American editor at the age of twenty-four. Sullivan's "Feet in Smoke," a wildly eloquent article about his brother who was electrocuted and fell into a coma fom which he emerged with some unsettling philosophical insights, as included in THE BEST OF THE OXFORD AMERICAN anthology. After two years at the OA, Sullivan moved to New York in 2000 to work in the history department of Oxford University Press. After a year there, he was hired by Harper's, where in 2002 he became a senior editor (he now serves as contributing editor). His 2002 cover story for Harper's, "Horseman, Pass By," won a National Magazine Award for feature writing and the Eclipse Award for the year's best magazine article about horse racing. The piece has now been expanded into a book, BLOOD HORSES: NOTS OF A SPORTSWRITER'S SON, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. William Nack, author of SECRETERIAT and contributing editor of Sports Illustrated, says, "BLOOD HORSES is truly an original - a literary hybrid that ranges gracefully from the horse in prehistory to the horse in war to the running of the Kentucky Derby... An always fascinating, often touching read." Sullivan currently lives in Manhattan and works as a writer-at-large for GQ. He is a fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Rex Nelson, Guest Interviewer

Rex Nelson is the director of communications for Gov. Mike Huckabee and a member of the governor's senior management team. Prior to joining the governor's staff in July 1996, he was the political editor for four years of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the state's largest newspaper. As political editor, Nelson supervised the state Capitol and Washington bureaus. Before joining the newspaper in August 1992, Nelson was editor of Arkansas Business, a statewide publication based in Little Rock.

Nelson, 44, has won more than 20 state and national journalism awards. While at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, he was a regular panelist on the Arkansas Educational Television Network program Arkansas Week and hosted a daily radio talk show on Little Rock station KARN-AM 920, the state's premier news-talk station.