Pulitzer winner Blackmon leaving Wall Street Journal

Douglas Blackmon, a senior national correspondent at The Wall Street Journal and a Pulitzer Prize winner, will announce Monday that he is leaving the paper.

Blackmon will be joining the University of Virginia. He will also work for the Washington Post, becoming a contributing editor working with the national politics team.

At Virginia, Blackmon will be chair of the Miller Center Forum, which organizes debates and seminars focused on presidential policy and produces a public affairs television show distributed nationally on PBS stations; and a lecturer in media studies.

His book, “Slavery by Another Name,” was awarded the 2009 Pulizer Prize for general non-fiction. The book also received the 2009 American Book Award, the 2009 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Non-fiction Book Prize, and the 2008 Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Award, among others. It appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List in both hardcover and paperback editions.

Blackmon is currently executive producer of and a major figure in the documentary film based on his book. The movie is premiering at Sundance and airing on PBS on Feb. 13.

After leaving the Journal, he’ll also be  working on a feature film project related to Slavery by Another Name and another film project in conjunction with his next book — a reexamination 30 years later of the integration of public schools in his Mississippi hometown.

As the Journal’s senior national correspondent since 2009, Blackmon has written about many of the biggest developments in American life, including the 2010 midterm elections, the rise of the Tea Party movement, the 2012 president campaigns, and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. His work on the BP disaster, along with a team of other Journal reporters and editors, was a finalist for another Pulitzer Prize, for national reporting, in 2011. The BP coverage was awarded the 2011 New York Association of Publishers prize for Investigative Reporting.

As the Journal’s bureau chief in Atlanta until 2009, Blackmon managed the paper’s coverage of airlines and other major transportation companies and publicly traded companies and institutions based in the southeastern U.S.