Andrew Maraniss

Andrew Maraniss ( ) is an American author, best known for his book, "''Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the collision of race and sports in the south''", depicting Perry Wallace, the first African-American to play college basketball under an athletic scholarship in the Southeastern Conference (Vanderbilt University) in the 1960s. The book was on the ''New York Times'' best-seller list in both the sports and civil rights categories for four consecutive months. It received the 2015 Lillian Smith Book Award and a Special Recognition Award by the Robert F. Kennedy Book Awards Foundation.

Maraniss attended Vanderbilt University in 1992 on a Fred Russell-Grantland Rice Scholarship for Sports Journalism. He won the school's Charles Foster Alexander Award for excellence in journalism in 1992 and in 2016 was inducted in the Vanderbilt Student Media Hall of Fame. He was designated Vanderbilt's "Writer-in-Residence" in 2017. The popularity of the book reoriented his former career in public relations into that of full-time author. After ''Strong Inside'', Maraniss published additional works including ''Games of Deception'' (2019), ''Singled Out'' (2021), and ''Inaugural Ballers'' (2022). Maraniss' father, David Maraniss, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and associate editor for ''The Washington Post''. Provided by Wikipedia