Curtis Wilkie

Associate Professor, Cook Chair and Overby Fellow

Curtis Wilkie is a native Mississippian and a 1963 graduate of Ole Miss with a degree in journalism. For six years he was a reporter and editor at the Clarksdale Press Register in Clarksdale, Miss. In 1969 he received a Congressional Fellowship from the American Political Science Assn. and worked on Capitol Hill as a legislative assistant for Sen. Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota and Rep. John Brademas of Indiana. He was a reporter and editor, 1971-74, at the News-Journal papers in Wilmington, Del.

Until his retirement in 2000, he was a national and foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe.for 26 years. He covered eight presidential campaigns (seven for the Globe), served as White House correspondent 1977-82, was named chief of the Globe’s Middle East bureau and lived in Jerusalem 1984-87. He later was chief of a Southern bureau in New Orleans, 1993-2000.

He began teaching at The University of Mississippi and, later, Louisiana State University in 2002. In 2004, he was named the Kelly G. Cook chair in journalism at Ole Miss and became a fulltime faculty member. In 2007, he was named the inaugural Overby Fellow at the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics at Ole Miss. In 2005, he was given a special award for excellence in non-fiction writing by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is the co-author of “Arkansas Mischief” (1998), the author of “Dixie” (2001), and co-author of “City Adrift” (2007). He has also written for many national magazines. He has homes in Oxford, Miss., and New Orleans, with his wife, Nancy. He has three grown children, Carter Wilkie of Boston, Leighton McCool of Oxford, and Stuart Wilkie of Wilmington, Del.