Edward Ball is an American writer for "The Village Voice." His first book, "Slaves in the Family", won the National Book Award. He is also the author of "The Sweet Hell Inside."
Background
Edward Ball was born on October 8, 1959 in Savannah, Georgia, United States, grew up in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. Journalist Edward Ball grew up as a part of a well-established family. He was able to trace his paternal lineage back to an Englishman named Elias Ball who arrived in that state in 1698 while it was still an English colony. When he asked his relatives questions about his family’s history during the days of Southern slave ownership, according to Time contributor Tamala Edwards, he would always receive the answers: “We were good to our Negroes. There was no miscegenation.”
Ball decided to research his family history regarding slaves himself, however, and looking through old records, he found a different truth — what Edwards described as “violence and the mixing of black blood with white.” One of Ball’s ancestors, Henry Laurens, served as the first president of the Continental Congress, but, in Edwards’ words, he “was also the largest slave trader in America.”
Education
Edward finished high school in New Orleans and attended Brown University, graduating in 1982 with a Bachelor of Arts in Semiotics. He received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1984, and afterwards moved to New York City.
Career
Edward moved to New York City, where he worked as a freelance art critic, writing about film, art, architecture, and books for several magazines. For several years, he wrote for The Village Voice, a weekly with a circulation of 450,000. In 1993, he began to research his family legacy as slave owners in South Carolina, an investigation that resulted in a half-hour National Public Radio documentary, "The Other History," which was awarded, in 1994, Best Radio Feature by the Society of Professional Journalists.
Edward looked deeper into his family's story, documented in several archives, and, after three years, published his first book, "Slaves in the Family", about his family's plantations and his search for black Americans whose ancestors the writer's family had once enslaved. "Slaves in the Family" was a New York Times bestseller and won the National Book Award for nonfiction. Ball has since appeared on television programs such as that hosted by popular talk-show hostess Oprah Winfrey to discuss "Slaves in the Family."
Edward Ball's other books comprise biography, history, and memoir. He has taught at Yale University, and he lives in New Haven, Connecticut. At the Radcliffe Institute, Ball is investigating the life of a fighter in the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana, a member of Ball’s own family, examining the role of a participant in the race terror that spread through the South after the end of the Civil War, during Reconstruction. The book he is writing is outwardly the biography of a plain Southerner, a person neither distinguished nor well documented, while it is also an attempt to explore the roots of white supremacy.
Edward is the recipient of a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and a grant from the Public Scholar Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His book "The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder" and the "Birth of Moving Pictures" (Doubleday, 2013) — a story of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1880s California — is in development as a television miniseries.
