Will Leitch

William F. "Will" Leitch (born October 10, 1975 in Mattoon, Illinois) is a writer and the founding editor of the Gawker Media sports blog Deadspin. Leitch is a senior editor at Sports on Earth, a contributing editor at New York, critic at The New Republic, culture writer for Bloomberg Politics, contributor to The New York Times, GQ, Fast Company and Slate; and has published four books, Catch, a novel, Life as a Loser, a memoir, God Save The Fan, a book of sports essays, and Are We Winning?, a book about fatherhood and baseball.

Leitch was born and grew up in Mattoon, Illinois, which is also the setting of Catch. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While there, he was an editor at the University's paper, the Daily Illini. He now lives in Athens, Georgia.

One of Leitch's first glances with fame came when he appeared on one of the early episodes of Win Ben Stein's Money. In an excerpt from Life as a Loser, published on Blacktable.com, Leitch describes the experience of taping this episode within hours of being dumped by his fiancée (a fact that co-host Jimmy Kimmel included in Leitch's introduction).

Life as a Loser appeared on Ironminds, an online magazine that existed from 1999-2002.

In January 2003, Leitch became a founding editor of the website The Black Table, with Eric Gillin, A.J. Daulerio and Aileen Gallagher. His Life As A Loser column ran online for five years and was ultimately compiled into a book of the same title, with a foreword written by Tom Perrotta.

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