Keith Dunnavant is the critically acclaimed author of five sports books, including America’s Quarterback, and the long-time president and editor-in-chief of Solovox Publishing, where he operates the award-winning online magazines College Football Replay and Crimson Replay.
A veteran journalist who has been chasing deadlines for more than three decades, he has carved out an unusual niche, combining journalism and entrepreneurship like few professionals in American media.
Before moving his business online, Dunnavant was the founding publisher and editor-in-chief of the college football magazine Dunnavant’s Paydirt Illustrated, the NASCAR title Dunnavant’s Speed! Illustrated, and the Florida lifestyle magazine South Walton Life. In building Paydirt into a successful brand with more than 300,000 readers, he devised and implemented a revolutionary business model—leveraging a licensing program that created partnerships with television and radio stations and retailers including Blockbuster Video and McDonald’s and, in the process, blazing a new trail for the publishing industry. While earning the trust of discerning fans across the Southeast and a long list of major awards for editorial excellence—including the Best of Show prize from the Society of Professional Journalists for his 1995 feature on former Florida coach Charley Pell’s battle with depression—Paydirt demonstrated Dunnavant’s entrepreneurial creativity.
One of the rare journalists who has been a senior-level editor in three distinct magazine genres—sports, business and general interest—Dunnavant’s career in editorial management also includes stints as editor of Adweek Magazines’ Special Report and managing editor of Mediaweek, both based in New York, and executive editor of Atlanta magazine. Working with writers to craft compelling narrative features on a variety of topics, he has directed coverage of everything from national politics to network television. At the Adweek group, he led the team that produced a special issue concerning the 2000 general election. At Mediaweek, his weekly cover stories set a new standard in narrative journalism for the news magazine of the media business. At Atlanta, his day-to-day management of the monthly included shepherding the venerable title’s 40th anniversary issue. He was also a long-time contributor to several magazines including Sport, BusinessWeek and Atlanta, specializing in profiles of prominent figures including Ralph Reed, Jann Wenner, Nancy Grace, Bobby Cremins, and Johnny Majors.
His writing and editing has been recognized with dozens of national and regional awards, including nine Green Eyeshade Awards from the Society of Professional Journalists; eight feature writing awards from the Football Writers Association of America; one gold medal, one silver medal and one bronze medal from the City & Regional Magazine Association; 19 GAMMA Awards from the Magazine Association of the Southeast; and two Charlie Awards from the Florida Magazine Association.
In his non-fiction books, Dunnavant frequently endeavors to blur the lines between sports and culture, revealing larger truths that strike at the heart of the American experience.
His books have been called “fascinating” (The New York Times), “evocative and provocative” (Sports Illustrated), “insightful” (Publishers Weekly), “stunning” (The Tampa Tribune), “masterful” (The Christian Science Monitor) and “balanced and intelligent” (Kirkus Reviews).
Dunnavant’s latest book, America’s Quarterback: Bart Starr and the Rise of the National Football League, will be published in September 2011 by the Thomas Dunne Books imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
Starr, the quarterback who led Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers to a record five NFL championships in seven years during the 1960s, has often been overshadowed by the enormity of his coach’s enduring mystique. While painstakingly making the case for Starr’s pivotal role in the Packers’ success as professional football captured the nation’s imagination, America’s Quarterback also tells a broader story about an underdog who reflected something fundamental about the country while reaching for success and validation, undaunted by rejection, humiliation and heartbreak.
In Coach, his widely praised 1996 biography of Paul “Bear” Bryant (Simon & Schuster), Dunnavant offers a definitive portrait of the legendary football coach who was driven by the lingering echo of youthful inferiority, becoming a giant in his profession and the foremost Southern icon of his age. Both CBS and ESPN relied heavily on Coach to craft the narratives for subsequent documentaries on Bryant.
Dunnavant’s expertise on college football history has also been featured—on and off camera—on ESPN’s SportsCentury and Honor Roll and HBO’s Breaking the Huddle.
No stranger to video, Dunnavant has produced several film projects with ShadowVision Productions business partner Jonathan Hickman, including Crashing the Party, a two-hour documentary on the rise of two-party politics in the state of Alabama.
A decade after Coach, Bear Bryant loomed large in The Missing Ring (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), Dunnavant’s book on the 1966 University of Alabama football team’s quest for an unprecedented third consecutive national championship. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, and a world on the brink of dramatic change, the book takes readers deep inside the Alabama program of the sixties, tracing the harrowing journey of a diverse group of players who chased perfection in an imperfect world, unable to avoid a collision with the historic forces roiling American society.
Widely recognized for his authoritative writing about college football, Dunnavant chronicled the symbiotic relationship between television and the sport in his critically acclaimed 2004 book, The Fifty-Year Seduction (St. Martin’s Press). Connecting the dots between the climate of fear that caused the nation’s major colleges to try to protect themselves from television in the fifties and the long evolution that caused them to become dependent on the medium, the book traces the rise of the NCAA, the Supreme Court’s landmark Board of Regents decision, conference realignment, and the birth of the Bowl Championship Series.
A native of Athens, Ala., Dunnavant started his journalism career at a local weekly newspaper at the age of 14 by talking his way into a job that did not exist. Soon, the young sports editor of The Journal, circulation 11,000, was covering not only the local high school teams but also Southeastern Conference football and basketball—before he was old enough to drive. This early experience led to jobs with bigger papers in the area and eventually, a student assistant’s position with the University of Alabama sports information office, which allowed him to pay his way through college.
As a sportswriter for The National, Sports inc., Los Angeles Times, Dallas Times Herald and Birmingham Post-Herald, Dunnavant traveled the country covering college football and basketball, Major League Baseball, the National Football League and various other sports. Along the way, he chased some of the most important sports news stories of the day and interviewed many of the major sports figures of the last half of the 20th century, including Pete Rose, Willie Mays, Buster Douglas, Ted Turner, Richard Petty, Billy Payne, Bill France…and virtually every significant college football player and coach of the age.
Once the youngest reporter in the press boxes at Alabama, Auburn and Vanderbilt—during the era of Paul “Bear” Bryant, Doug Barfield and George MacIntyre—Dunnavant eventually distinguished himself as one of the country’s leading national college football writers, particularly in his days covering the sport for The National, the revolutionary but ill-fated New York-based all-sports newspaper headed by iconic sports journalist Frank Deford. Especially during his sportswriting days, Dunnavant was utilized as a college football expert by a long list of radio talk shows across America, making regular appearances on the 200-plus station One on One Sports network and the Paul Finebaum Radio Network, the most influential show of its kind in the Southeast.
Two decades after walking away from daily journalism to pursue a career in books and magazines, Dunnavant is applying his brand of incisive and thought-provoking journalism to the online arena with the college football history magazines College Football Replay and the Alabama-centric Crimson Replay. Complete with branded and conceptual video and audio content as well as insightful articles, the two titles are redefining what a sports magazine should be in the Internet age. Dunnavant hosts Distant Replay, the only video program on the Web devoted exclusively to interviewing former college stars, as well as the Time Capsule audio podcast, which features prominent voices from the sport’s past. In its first year, Crimson Replay was recognized with two Green Eyeshade Awards—First Place for Best Online Sports Reporting and Second Place for Best Specialized Website. While competing against some of the largest media brands in the Southeast, it was the only independent website honored.
A former adjunct professor at the University of Alabama and a former member of the board of directors of the Magazine Association of the Southeast, he is also an accomplished after-dinner speaker who has headlined events for dozens of civic, business, alumni, and sports groups across the Southeast.
Dunnavant lives near Atlanta, where he is at work on his sixth book.