Rick Cleveland, a Hattiesburg native, is the most decorated sports journalist in Mississippi history. In more than 40 years as a sports editor and columnist, he won scores of state, regional and national awards for his writing and reporting.
Cleveland became the executive director of the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and Museum in 2012 after 33 years with The Clarion-Ledger and more than 40 years as a full-time sports writer. He is now the historian of the Hall of Fame, writes for the museum's website and also writes a syndicated weekly column that appears in newspapers around the state. He also writes a weekly column for the Mississippi Today website.
In 2011 he became the first sports writer ever to be honored with the prestigious Richard Wright Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Excellence. Previous winners include such authors as Eudora Welty, Richard Ford and Willie Morris.
Cleveland, the author of four books, also received the Distinguished Mississippian Award from the Mississippi Press Association's Education Foundation in 2000. His most recent book,Mississippi's Greatest Athletes (Nautilus 2014), is in its second printing.