Professor Tyson, a native of eastern North Carolina and graduate of Duke University (Ph.D. 1994), is the author of Blood Done Sign My Name, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Southern Book Award for nonfiction, the Christopher Award and the North Caroliniana Book Award, among others. Blood Done Sign My Name was the 2005 selection of the Carolina Summer Reading Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, assigned to all incoming undergraduates. Tyson's previous book Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (UNC Press, 1999) won the James Rawley Prize and was co-winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, both from the Organization of American Historians (OAH). Radio Free Dixie became the basis for "Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power," a documentary film made at the Documentary Center at the University of Florida and broadcast on PBS-TV on February 7, which won the 2006 Barnouw Award for best historical film from the OAH. He also co-edited, with David S. Cecelski, Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (UNC Press, 1998), which won the 1999 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America.Tyson was John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2004-05 and continues to serve as Distinguished Lecturer for the OAH.