The author of Blood in the Water is a historian currently working at the University of Michigan. She completed her PhD at the University of Princeton. Thompson herself encountered many of the problems of state secrecy and cover-ups that she draws attention to in the text during her research for this work. She was continually denied access to key documents by the FBI and Justice department despite submitting requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

Thompson won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for Blood in the Water. Her other works include Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s (2009) and Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (2001/2017). She has also published several articles on the causes and effects of mass incarceration in the United States.

Oswald was the commissioner for the department of correctional services (DOCS) for New York State during the Attica uprising. In other words, he was head of the New York State penal system. Oswald cuts an ambiguous figure in Blood in the Water. On the one hand, Thompson makes it clear that he is committed to prison reform. For example, he renames prisons as “correctional facilities” and guards as “correctional officers.