He is the author of numerous books including When Evil Lived in Laurel: The White Knights and the Murder of Vernon Dahmer, and Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South.

Historian Douglas Brinkley wrote that, "Over the past four decades no reporter has critiqued the American South with such evocative sensitivity and bedrock honesty as Curtis Wilkie.

In 1969, Wilkie received a Congressional Fellowship from the American Political Science Association to work in Washington, D.C. as an aide to Sen. Walter F. Mondale (D-Minn.) and Rep. John Brademas (D-Ind,) from 1969 to 1971.

In the mid 1980s, he served as Middle East bureau chief for the Globe and covered the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the 1983 bombing of the US Marines barracks in Beirut, the first Palestinian intifada, and the first Gulf War.

On Christmas Day 1989, he was with a small group of journalists who came under fire in Timișoara, Romania, while covering fighting between revolutionaries and forces loyal to Nicolae Ceausescu, the deposed president.

In 2004, Wilkie's friend since childhood, attorney James P. "Butch" Cothren of Jackson, convinced him to return to his home state and teach journalism at the University of Mississippi.