E. Thomas Wood

As a journalist and historian, Tom has devoted much of his life to telling the stories of his hometown. When not filing business, investigative and other articles for the Nashville Scene, the Nashville Business Journal, the Nashville Banner, The Tennessean, Nashville Life, Business Nashville, NashvillePost.com and the Nashville City Paper, he has often been engrossed in one aspect or another of the city's history. He has written or contributed to several books on Nashville-related topics, serving as co-creator (with the late John Egerton, one of his mentors) of the 2001 multi-author book Nashville: An American Self-Portrait. A frequent freelance contributor to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s, Tom published stories on topics ranging from the business careers of celebrities such as Esther Williams and Ted Nugent to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing and Romania's efforts to join NATO. In 1994, John Wiley & Sons published Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust, by Tom and co-author Stanislaw M. Jankowski. Tom set out to tell the story of Polish-born Roman Catholic Jan Karski after interviewing him at Vanderbilt in 1986 and learning of his efforts to carry news of the murder of Jews to the West in 1942-43. Eventually, he became a trusted friend of Professor Karski, who died in 2000. The book gained international attention and helped spark a belated recognition of Karski's heroism. In 2012, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Karski the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House in Tom's presence. An updated edition of the book was published in 2014. In 2015, the documentary film Karski & The Lords of Humanity had its premiere in theaters across Poland and Russia and then in major U.S. markets. Tom was a co-writer and the principal narrator of the film, which included extensive interviews he had filmed as an "exit interview," at Professor Karski's suggestion, in 1996. Tom has spoken at numerous screenings of the documentary and other Karski-related events across North America. In 2012, Tom helped write The Suspect: A Memoir, by Jeffrey Womack and the late John J. Hollins Sr., and he served as a consultant on the companion documentary by Demetria Kalodimos, Indelible: The Case Against Jeffrey Womack. The book and film exposed the police corruption and incompetence that made a victim not only of former murder suspect Womack but also of the Nashville community at large. In 2013, the public radio program "This American Life" ran a segment on the case. Tom is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (1986) and the University of Cambridge, where he earned an M. Phil. in European Studies through Pembroke College in 2002. He taught business and investigative journalism at three Romanian universities in 1997. Since 2012, Tom has been a staff writer for the global law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, which has an operations office in Nashville.