Richard Sowers, author of Shatterproof, long has enjoyed a reputation as one of America's leading sports historians, and his vast knowledge of so many sports no doubt served him well in creating Shatterproof, which includes a wide variety of sports and encompasses the 19th Century into 2005.

Sowers, a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has spent most of his professional career as a sports journalist. He served as a columnist for two Virginia newspapers; spent five years as Sports Editor of North Carolina's largest afternoon newspaper; four years with The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky.; most of an eight-year stint with The Sporting News as its News Editor; served as Managing Editor of a general-interest magazine, and even spent six years as a sports promoter as Executive Director of Public Relations at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Although Sowers has been most closely associated as a writer and editor with college basketball and football, horse racing, auto racing, golf and baseball, he also has spent considerable time on the pro football and basketball, tennis, boxing and track & field beats during his career.

Although Sowers actually has spent more time as a newspaper, magazine and book editor than as a writer, he has managed to write more than 2,000 magazine and newspaper articles and, in addition to the aforementioned publications, has written for such widely diverse outlets as USA Today, The Blood-Horse and NASCAR Magazine.

He is the author of two highly acclaimed books about the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, The Complete Statistical History of Stock-Car Racing and Stock-Car Racing Lives, and a book on horse racing, The Abstract Primer of Thoroughbred Racing, which also has been widely acclaimed by critics.

Sowers lives in suburban Atlanta.