BIOGRAPHY
Keith Dunnavant is an acclaimed author, documentary filmmaker, and media trailblazer who specializes in contemporary American history.
Deftly straddling the worlds of journalism and entrepreneurship, Dunnavant achieved industry prominence as a sportswriter, magazine writer, newsroom executive and magazine owner before authoring several important football books—including definitive biographies of Paul “Bear” Bryant (COACH), Joe Montana (MONTANA), and Bart Starr (AMERICA’S QUARTERBACK)—which established him as a leading sports author and historian.
In recent years he has broadened his narrative range.
His bookshelf includes the biography SPEED, which focused on the stratospheric life of SR-71 Blackbird test pilot Bob Gilliland and the murky world of the Lockheed Skunk Works, and SPY PILOT, which resulted from a collaboration with the son of controversial U-2 aviator Francis Gary Powers.
Utilizing once-classified CIA files, never-published letters, audio tapes, and interviews with previously unavailable sources, SPY PILOT challenged the mythology surrounding the U-2 Incident while telling a story crackling with Cold War intrigue, including the dramatic Berlin prisoner swap portrayed in the Steven Spielberg film BRIDGE OF SPIES. The book also revealed the story of a son who was haunted by his father’s premature death, showing how he spent decades seeking truth and justice for his dad—and a measure of peace and closure for himself.
Known for his anecdotal detail and context, and for exploring various aspects of the human experience, including the power of doubt, tenacity, shame, addiction, redemption, and unconditional love, he often strikes at the collision of sports and culture, most notably in 2006’s THE MISSING RING, hailed by SPORTS ILLUSTRATED as “evocative and provocative” and deserving of a place in college football’s “literary starting lineup.”
Testing the boundaries of the sports genre, Dunnavant held up a mirror to a time and place on the brink. The book about the 1966 University of Alabama football team took readers deep into the lives of the overachievers who chased perfection in an imperfect world—struggling to live up to Bryant’s demanding standards, forever shadowed by the infamy of segregationist Governor George Wallace.
His books can be found on superlative lists compiled by THE DAILY BEAST, BLEACHER REPORT, SPY and other media, and have been called “fascinating” (THE NEW YORK TIMES), “brilliant” (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY), “balanced and intelligent” (KIRKUS REVIEWS), “thought-provoking” (THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR), and “emotionally taut” (SAN FRANCISCO BOOK REVIEW).
His recent expansion into films reflects a determination to keep stretching himself as a storyteller.
THREE DAYS AT FOSTER, the definitive documentary about the long-overlooked African-American athletes who shattered the color barrier in Tuscaloosa, showed how those pioneers tapped into a force more powerful than hate, helping Alabamians begin to see beyond black and white. It became an official selection of the Sidewalk Film Festival and the All-Sports Los Angeles Film Festival before airing in syndication in all five Alabama television markets, prompting a flurry of recognition for the athletes, including Wilbur Jackson, who has often been obscured by the mythology surrounding the 1970 Alabama-Southern Cal game. As a direct result of Dunnavant’s film, the A-Club letterman’s association formally honored the previously unknown Black students who walked onto the all-white Bama football team in 1967.
While developing book and film projects, Dunnavant hosts the AMERICAN ACHIEVERS podcast, conducting in-depth interviews with intriguing and accomplished individuals about their pursuit of the American Dream.
The founding publisher and editor-in-chief of six different Solovox Publishing magazines, including the 1990s football title DUNNAVANT’S PAYDIRT ILLUSTRATED, he spent two decades in magazine management and ownership in Atlanta and New York. The success of Solovox caused him to be recruited back into the corporate world, where he served as editor of ADWEEK MAGAZINES’ SPECIAL REPORT, executive editor of ATLANTA, and managing editor of MEDIAWEEK.
Specializing in narrative journalism, he developed incisive features and cover stories about a variety of newsmakers and issues while directing coverage of media, sports, business, culture and politics, including the 2000 national elections.
During his sportswriting career, Dunnavant wrote about several major sports and many legendary figures. He covered college football for two decades, from the final years of Paul “Bear” Bryant to the early years of the Bowl Championship Series, reporting about every important program, coach and development of the era.
THE FIFTY-YEAR SEDUCTION, his book about the cause-and-effect of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Board of Regents decision, became a required read for athletic administrators. It has been utilized as a textbook at various universities. By connecting the dots between the NCAA’s 1951 power grab and the 1984 judicial earthquake that launched college football’s modern age, he showed how profoundly television had influenced the sport’s evolution, prompting one-time boss Frank Deford to proclaim him “the first certified NCAA-ologist.”
His expertise about the sport’s history is widely recognized, and a long list of television programs have been enlivened by his commentary and shaped by his books.
Two documentaries about Bryant—CBS’s Emmy-nominated THE BEAR and an episode of ESPN’s SPORTSCENTURY franchise—based their stories on COACH, utilizing him as a creative consultant and leading voice. He has also been seen as a featured historian on HBO’s Emmy-winning BREAKING THE HUDDLE, SEC Network’s SATURDAYS IN THE SOUTH, ESPN programs including THE AMERICAN GAME, FOOTBALL IS US and HONOR ROLL, Showtime’s AGAINST THE TIDE, and Epix’s SCHOOLED.
Profoundly influenced by his father, innovative broadcaster Bob Dunnavant, Keith grew up around his family’s radio stations in Athens, Alabama. Also shaped by the example of his oldest brother, Bob, Jr., a respected newspaper journalist, he negotiated the first tentative steps toward his own media career during his elementary-school years.
During the summer before he entered high school, the 14-year-old created his first real job: Convincing the publisher of THE JOURNAL, a local weekly newspaper, to allow him to start a sports section—and devising and implementing a strategy to fund his own salary.
Pushing against the boundaries of age, Dunnavant filled the weekly with coverage of the eight Limestone County high schools and the local small college and set his sights toward the distant horizon, working the system to become the youngest credentialed reporter in the Southeastern Conference—a regular in the press boxes, locker rooms and post-game news conferences at Alabama, Auburn and Vanderbilt before he was old enough to own a driver’s license. No one knew how young he was, even after one pointed post-game question caused Bama’s C.M. Newton to storm out, never to coach another basketball game for the Crimson Tide.
Soon he moved up to cover high school, small college and SEC sports for THE DECATUR DAILY and HUNTSVILLE NEWS, landed a side job as a local cable TV sports announcer, produced and marketed several advertiser-supported sports media ventures, and achieved state and national recognition as the editor of his high school paper.
Leveraging his early experience to secure his college education, he was recruited to Alabama as a writer/editor/media liaison on athletic scholarship—a life-altering deal sealed by an interview with the legendary Bryant, who authorized the job just seven months before his sudden death. As a sports information student assistant, he worked closely with the football, basketball, baseball and swimming teams. Among his various duties, he edited the basketball game program TIDE TIPOFF, founded and edited ALABAMA BASEBALL TIMES, and traveled with the baseball team.
Dunnavant transitioned back into newspapers and landed several prized reporting internships. He wrote for the state-wide BIRMINGHAM POST-HERALD during his last three years in college, served as sports editor of THE CRIMSON WHITE, and freelanced for papers including USA TODAY. He wrote extensively about college football and basketball, NCAA issues, Major League Baseball and other sports and also spent a summer chasing breaking news for the city desk at THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION.
His enterprise projects for the POST-HERALD and DALLAS TIMES HERALD dug deep into various aspects of college athletics, including the unintended consequences of deregulated football television—one of several packages that reached a national audience through the Scripps Howard News Service. His investigation into the shaky finances of the Crimson Tide sports empire made the network news and prompted a follow-up article in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED.
The first college student to be recognized for excellence by the Alabama Sportswriters Association—winning more awards in 1987 than any other journalist—he also won the William Randolph Hearst National Writing Award.
Determined to reach beyond his comfort zone, Dunnavant turned down prominent college beats at several large newspapers—including the Alabama job at THE BIRMINGHAM NEWS—after being selected to join one of the industry’s elite internship programs. As a staff writer for the Orange County Edition of the LOS ANGELES TIMES, part of the country’s leading sports department, he reported about a variety of subjects, including an East German defector’s battle to swim in the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics and the birth of a Disney-backed college football game. Several months later, he was promoted within the Times Mirror family: moving to New York to become associate editor of SPORTS INC., the weekly sports business magazine, where his expertise about college athletics proved especially valuable.
His writing attracted the attention of the journalists who were busy building a new kind of newspaper, headquartered in Midtown Manhattan.
THE NATIONAL, the revolutionary but short-lived all-sports daily, launched to tremendous fanfare in January 1990. The greatest collection of sportswriting talent ever assembled under one roof included all-stars hired away from the country’s best newspapers and magazines.
A decade after his time as the youngest journalist in SEC press boxes, Dunnavant landed one of the most prestigious jobs in sports journalism. Making his mark on the college football beat, he cemented his reputation for authoritative writing about the sport for a coast-to-coast readership, including coverage of the realignment frenzy that reflected a new age of intensified competition among the major conferences. He also traveled the country to write about college basketball, the National Football League, MLB, and television, and scored the first sit-down interview with underdog heavyweight James “Buster” Douglas after he shocked the world by knocking out Mike Tyson.
Then he took the biggest risk of his career.
At the age of 26, firmly established as one of the leading college football writers of his generation, he stepped off the sportswriting fast-track.
It was a huge gamble, because he had a very bright future on the sports page.
Eager to chase other ambitions, he secured his first book contract and, feeling the powerful tug of his inner entrepreneur, founded his own magazine publishing company.
The barrier to entry was formidable, and Dunnavant had spent years working the seven-figure funding riddle. His breakthrough solution, first sketched onto a Los Angeles coffee-shop napkin, was unorthodox and unproven. Solving the riddle allowed him to launch Solovox Publishing entirely out of his pocket—with no investors and no debt.
Leveraging his innovative licensing system to create partnerships with a group of radio and TV stations and distributors including Blockbuster Video, Dunnavant disrupted the traditional magazine business model and invented a new way of publishing.
The magazine he created to exploit this strategy focused on college football and emphasized a sophisticated brand of hard-hitting journalism. DUNNAVANT’S PAYDIRT ILLUSTRATED was a different kind of regional sports magazine, and it earned the trust of readers across the Southeast, reaching a circulation of 125,000.
Even as he built Solovox into a successful independent publishing company and started his book career, Keith flexed several different journalistic muscles. He covered sports business as a long-time contributor to BUSINESSWEEK, wrote college football features for the venerable monthly SPORT, remained a familiar football analyst on sports radio, and carved out a separate career in deeper narrative features.
Writing for his own magazines and others, including the monthly ATLANTA, he gained a reputation for insightful, intimate profiles of diverse figures, including a prosecutor motivated by a broken heart, a chef haunted by his troubled childhood behind the Iron Curtain, a basketball coach who struggled to overcome one hasty decision, and a political operative forced to choose between principle and ambition.
In 1996, “Out of Darkness,” his feature about former Florida football coach Charley Pell’s battle with depression, won the Best of Show prize in the Green Eyeshade Awards. This was a validating moment for PAYDIRT’s “New Paradigm in Magazine Publishing” as well as its journalism.
In addition to his long list of national and regional awards for feature writing and sportswriting, Dunnavant and his teams were honored more than two dozen times for magazine general excellence.
One of the rare journalists to hold senior editorial management positions in three distinct magazine genres—sports, business, and general interest—he also belonged to an even smaller fraternity, as a serial magazine entrepreneur and visionary who financed and marketed his own ventures.
Dunnavant repeatedly transformed an idea into a vibrant destination that attracted a community of readers and ultimately worked as a business, including the NASCAR title DUNNAVANT’S SPEED! ILLUSTRATED. He found tremendous satisfaction in creating and perfecting each editorial brand, including SOUTH WALTON LIFE, a quarterly focused on Northwest Florida’s upscale 30-A beach community. With CRIMSON REPLAY, which covered Alabama football history, he re-imagined the sports magazine for the digital age. While continuing Solovox’s tradition of award-winning writing and featuring two first-generation podcasts, the site pioneered branded and conceptual streaming video, including the road trip interview program DISTANT REPLAY and the game show TAILGATE SHOWDOWN. This winning formula led to the sister title COLLEGE FOOTBALL REPLAY.
A former adjunct professor at Alabama, Dunnavant has guest-lectured at Michigan, San Diego State, George Washington, and North Alabama. He has been the featured speaker for hundreds of civic, sports, alumni and business groups, including the Atlanta History Center, the Alabama Press Association, the Burbank Historical Society, the Tuscaloosa Quarterback Club, the Palm Springs Air Museum, the Birmingham Aero Club, and the Emerald Coast Red Elephant Club.