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About Gale In Context: Biography

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About Gale In Context: High School

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Called "America's Nelson Mandela," Bryan Stevenson is a talented and tireless defender of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the U.S. criminal justice system, especially African Americans, minors, and the mentally disabled. Stevenson's nonprofit legal organization, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), founded in 1989, has prevented the deaths of more than 100 prisoners and persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to end life sentences without parole for minors as young as 13. Stevenson is also the author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014), which Tim Adams of the London Guardian called a "powerful, profoundly affecting memoir" documenting "the policy of mass incarceration, the barely credible inhumanity that has seen young boys kept in solitary confinement for years and decades, and the evidence of institutional racism at the heart of the American justice system." In 2019, this powerful memoir was turned into a film.

Stevenson was born in Milton, Delaware, a poor and racially segregated town where he came of age during the 1960s. In an interview with Alex Carp in Guernica Magazine in 2014, Stevenson said, "More personally, I grew up in the rural South, in a community where black children couldn't go to the public schools. My parents bore the burden of segregation, with all of that humiliation, with all of that stigma. And I saw that play out in their lives. My dad couldn't go to high school because there was no black high school in our county." Even following the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated America's public schools, deeply rooted prejudice and discrimination led to segregated activities at school and in the community. For example, Stevenson could not play on the monkey bars when white children were on them, and he and his family entered through the back door when going to doctor's appointments.

The matriarch of Stevenson's family was his maternal grandmother, Victoria Golden. Her parents had been slaves in Virginia. Golden had grown up with the threat of lynchings before moving north to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as part of the Great Migration of blacks out of the South. Stevenson told Adams that his grandmother's stories, the things she had heard from her own father about slavery, left a lasting impression on him, making slavery seem like something close to him and his family and convincing him, from an early age, of the importance and power of law.

"I talk about my grandmother a lot," he told Adams, "because she's an amazing person--not in some dramatic, distinct, unique way, but anybody who is the daughter of enslaved people and who has found a way to be hopeful and create love and value justice and seek peace is a remarkable person. And my parents, who grew up in terror and dealt with segregation and humiliation, nonetheless taught us to be hopeful and open and loving and not hateful toward anyone." Stevenson's mother, a product of the less racially oppressive culture she knew growing up in Philadelphia, also impressed on Stevenson the importance of fighting back against discrimination.

At Cape Henlopen High School, Stevenson was an excellent student and a budding orator, winning several public speaking contests while also serving as president of the student body. He attended Prospect African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he played the piano for the church choir. The church's tradition of parishioners publicly confessing their sins also contributed to Stevenson's future role as a so-called death penalty lawyer. He began seeing people as distinct from their sins, or as more human than even their worst sin would suggest.

Stevenson enrolled at Eastern University, a Christian school in Philadelphia, where majored in political science and philosophy and directed the campus gospel choir. A top student, Stevenson next headed to Harvard University to pursue a law degree and a master's degree in public policy. At Harvard, Stevenson told Paul Barrett in NYU Law Magazine, "I stopped almost immediately trying to fit in. I thought about it more like a cultural anthropologist." Although Stevenson felt as if he did not fit in at Harvard, he soon found the right place for himself within the legal world.

In January of 1983 Stevenson traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, for a month-long internship with the Southern Center for Human Rights, a legal and nonprofit advocacy organization working throughout the Southeastern United States. Stevenson began work writing appeals for several death row clients and never looked back. After graduation, he continued to work for the Southern Center for Human Rights, where the organization's founder, Stephen Bright, sent him to defend death row inmates in Alabama. During this same time, Stevenson was sitting inside his car outside of his own apartment when a SWAT unit pulled up, pointed a gun at him, and yelled, "Move and I'll blow your head off!" In an interview with National Public Radio's Fresh Air more than 30 years later, Stevenson recalled how the incident had "reinforced what I had known all along, which is that we have a criminal justice system that treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent."

Started the Equal Justice Initiative

After several years working in Alabama, Stevenson started his own small legal office in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1989. With one assistant, he founded the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a nonprofit that focused on social justice and human rights within the context of America's criminal justice system. The EJI gave free legal services to clients who were the victims of racial bias or poor representation. It was a lean living--the nonprofit relied entirely on contributions--and the kind of crushing work that even the most dedicated lawyers did not often do long term.

However, Stevenson was known for his remarkable record of endurance in the field. Barrett described him as "single and famously ascetic" and cited his ability to virtually work around the clock, not just on his EJI cases but also as a professor of clinical law at New York University. As of 2015, Stevenson had argued five cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and had taken on countless cases of those who had been wrongly accused, tried, and convicted.

One of Stevenson's most well-known cases was that of Walter McMillian, a black man on death row in Alabama who was convicted of killing 18-year-old Ronda Morrison in 1986. During the trial, six black witnesses told a jury of 11 whites and one black they had seen McMillian at a church fish fry at the time of the murder, and yet three other witnesses testified against McMillian. Stevenson took up the case during the early 1990s, finding tapes that proved the police had coerced the three witnesses to falsely testify against McMillian, who had been having an affair with a white woman at the time of Morrison's murder. Stevenson managed to get McMillian exonerated in 1993, after the key witnesses admitted they had been coerced into testifying against McMillian.

Stevenson later told Fresh Air, "This is one of the few cases I've worked on where I got bomb threats and death threats because we were fighting to free this man who was so clearly innocent. It reveals this disconnect that I'm so concerned about when I think about our criminal justice system." He added, "It took us six years to get a court to ultimately overturn the conviction. I think it speaks to this resistance we have in this country to confronting our errors, to confronting our mistakes."

Extended His Impact beyond the Courtroom

In 2012 Stevenson gave the TED talk "We Need to Talk about Injustice," in which he outlined his conviction that the United States has never dealt with the trauma and legacy of slavery and that the current criminal justice system is dogged not only by this refusal to recognize the consequences of slavery but also by an increasingly punitive and privatized system wherein corporations are reaping profit from the criminalized lives of blacks and other vulnerable people. A deeply compelling speaker, Stevenson received two standing ovations.

Stevenson's EJI has also branched out from legal defense, hoping to shape the public's understanding of slavery, race, and poverty. In Montgomery, Alabama, where there are no fewer than 59 public markers commemorating the Confederacy, Stevenson sought to erect markers that addressed Montgomery's once-burgeoning slave trade. After resistance, the city permitted him and his colleagues to erect three markers that pertain to Montgomery's history of slave trading. In the future he hopes to take the effort to other cities.

Perhaps as another extension of his desire to educate, Stevenson published the memoir Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption in 2014. He told Adams, "I wrote the book because I am persuaded that if most people in America saw what I see on a regular basis they would not be able to reconcile themselves with these realities." He continued, "But our instinct is to deny. We have the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world, and yet we don't feel bad about it. I think we sometimes seem to feel that we give up too much power if we even recognise that we have made, and continue to make, colossal mistakes in this area."

Stevenson is the recipient of many honorary degrees and awards, including the Olof Palme Prize, the Gruber Prize, and a Lannan Grant. In a testament to his indefatigable dedication to social justice, his prize money flows directly back to EJI. "Fifty years ago the people doing what I do would have said 'my head is bloody but not bowed,'" Stevenson told Adams. "I don't have to say that. I don't think I can afford to be less courageous than they were."

Stevenson and the EJI continued to educate the public and defend the most vulnerable in society. EJI created the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, close to areas where enslaved people were housed and sold. The memorial and museum document and analyze the history of racial injustices, including enslavement, lynchings, and mass incarceration. The two institutions are separate from each other, but they are related.

In 2019 Stevenson's memoir was turned in a movie of the same name, starting Michael B. Jordan as Stevenson. The movie was directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, and it was made in collaboration with Stevenson. Stevenson had not approved a version of film before the 2019 version because he worried that the message of his book would be watered down. However, he approved of the final film.

PERSONAL INFORMATION:

Born Bryan Allen Stevenson on November 14, 1959, in Milton, DE; son of Howard Carlton (a factory worker) and Alice Gertrude (a clerk). Politics: Democrat. Education: Eastern University, BA, political science, philosophy, 1981; Harvard Law School, JD, 1985; Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, MPP, 1985.

CAREER:

Alabama Capital Representation Resource Center, executive director, 1989-95; Southern Center for Human Rights, attorney; Equal Justice Initiative, founder and executive director, 1989--; New York University School of Law, assistant professor and associate professor of clinical law, 1998-2002, professor of clinical law, 2003--.

AWARDS:

Reebok Human Rights Award, 1989; National Medal of Liberty, American Civil Liberties Union, 1991; MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 1995; Wisdom Award for Public Service, American Bar Association; Public Interest Lawyer of the Year, National Association of Public Interest Lawyers, 1996; Citizen Activist Award, Gleitsman Foundation, 2000; Olof Palme Prize, 2000; Award for Courageous Advocacy, American College of Trial Lawyers, 2004; Lawyer for the People Award, National Lawyers Guild, 2004; Distinguished Teaching Award, New York University, 2006; Katharine and George Alexander Law Prize, Santa Clara University School of Law, 2008; Gruber Prize, Gruber Foundation, 2009; Lannan Grant, Lannan Foundation, 2015; Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction for Just Mercy, 2015; NAACP Image Award for Just Mercy, 2015.

FURTHER READINGS:

Periodicals

Guardian (London), February 1, 2015; February 6, 2015.

NYU Law Magazine, 2007.

Online

"Bryan A. Stevenson," New York University School of Law, 2015, https://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/profile.cfm?section=bio&personID=20315 (accessed June 10, 2015).

Carp, Alex, "Walking with the Wind," Guernica Magazine, March 17, 2014, https://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/walking-with-the-wind/ (accessed June 14, 2015).

"How 'Just Mercy' Gets Close to Its Characters," New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/movies/just-mercy-clip.html (January 31, 2020).

"'Just Mercy' Attorney Asks U.S. To Reckon With Its Racist Past And Present," NPR, https://www.npr.org/2020/01/20/796234496/just-mercy-attorney-asks-u-s-to-reckon-with-its-racist-past-and-present (January 31, 2020).

"The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration," EJI, https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/museum (January 31, 2020).

"One Lawyer's Fight for Young Blacks and 'Just Mercy,'" Fresh Air, National Public Radio, October 20, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/10/20/356964925/one-lawyers-fight-for-young-blacks-and-just-mercy (accessed June 14, 2015).

Source Citation

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Called "America's Nelson Mandela," Bryan Stevenson is a talented and tireless defender of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the U.S. criminal justice system, especially African Americans, minors, and the mentally disabled. Stevenson's nonprofit legal organization, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), founded in 1989, has prevented the deaths of more than 100 prisoners and persuaded the U.S.

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Colson Whitehead is one of the most prominent writers on the literary scene today. A regular on the New York Times best books list, Whitehead has been compared to such authors as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Thomas Pynchon. For his literary accomplishments, Whitehead received numerous awards, including a coveted "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 2002, recognizing him as one of the nation's top creative minds and signaling that he is a writer to watch. Moreover, two of his works, The Underground Railroad (2016) and The Nickel Boys (2019) earned Whitehead the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Early Life and Career Beginnings

Colson Whitehead was born in 1969, one of four children of Arch and Mary Ann Whitehead, and grew up in New York City. He decided as early as age ten or eleven that "writing could be a cool job," he said to Tom Nolan in Bookselling This Week, and initially envisioned himself penning Spiderman comics or novels in the style of Steven King. His literary tastes matured as he went through high school, and as an English major at Harvard University he discovered such twentieth-century authors as Nathanael West, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, and Thomas Pynchon, whom he described to Nolan as "very good models for me when I was trying to find my voice."

After completing his undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1991, Whitehead joined the staff of the Village Voice, first working on the Voice Literary Supplement--his duties included opening the mail--and then writing book reviews and television criticism. Working under the threat of constant deadlines forced Whitehead to develop the work habits of a professional writer, and after a few years he had the confidence to start writing fiction.

Whitehead's first novel, The Intuitionist, was published in 1999. Set in an unnamed eastern metropolis--clearly modeled on New York City--the book features protagonist Lily Mae Watson, an aging elevator inspector who is set up by her coworkers to take the blame for a fatal elevator crash. The plot turns on a conflict between two rival groups of inspectors: the empiricists, who use hands-on methods to detect mechanical problems in elevator systems, and the intuitionists, who gauge the psychic vibrations of an elevator instead of performing physical inspections. Watson, who is known as the "first colored woman in the Department of Elevator Inspectors," is among the latter camp. Inspired by the hard-boiled detective fiction of writers such as Dashiell Hammett, the novel is full of big-city corruption and backroom intrigue, and Watson emerges a heroine caught in the middle, in classic film noir style.

The critical response to Whitehead's debut work was enthusiastic. Gary Krist of the New York Times hailed the novel as "ingenious and starkly original," and Publishers Weekly called it "meaty and mythic," noting that Whitehead "has a completely original story to tell, and he tells it well." Writing for Booklist, Donna Seaman situated The Intuitionist in a "literary lineage that includes Orwell, Ellison, Vonnegut, and Pynchon" and praised Whitehead's "shrewd and sardonic humor." The Intuitionist earned Whitehouse the Quality Paperback Club's New Voices Award in 1999 and was a finalist for the Ernest Hemingway/PEN Award.

In 2001 Whitehead followed up with John Henry Days, which takes place in West Virginia on the occasion of a festival commemorating John Henry and the unveiling of a postage stamp in his honor. The book focuses on J. Sutter, a freeloading journalist who embarks on a junket of publicity events, alternating with narratives tracing the John Henry legend. Praised for its epic scope, the novel was a New York Times Editors' Choice and a finalist for both the Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and it earned Whitehead the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award the following year.

Whitehead turned to nonfiction with his next book, The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Stories, published in 2003. Begun in 2000 as a side project while the author worked on a third novel, the collection took shape as Whitehead wandered about New York City with notebook in hand, writing down "speculations, observations, and impressions" that he later turned into essays. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the project took on new meaning as New Yorkers, Whitehead among them, grappled with what had happened to their city. "Part of writing is trying to make sense of the world," Whitehead explained to Felicia R. Lee in the New York Times. "With a personal book like 'Colossus' I was trying to figure out what discrete moments meant to me, to other people. Is there a community? How do we create community?"

Returning to fiction once again, Whitehead published two more novels: Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), featuring a "nomenclature expert" who is hired to rename a town, and Sag Harbor (2009), an autobiographical coming-of-age story. In the latter, Whitehead returns to the memory of summers spent on Long Island during the 1980s in a first-person narrative--written from the perspective of thirteen-year-old Benji Cooper--that is a departure from his previous work. "When I was starting out, I was too self-conscious to leave any explicitly personal traces in my work," he told Craig Morgan Teicher in Time Out New York. "Everybody does a first novel that has an autobiographical aspect.... So my main impulse with my first book ... was to be different and weird and not do what I saw as being obvious.... I'm older now, less squeamish about having overt aspects of my experience in my books."

Less conceptual than his previous novels, Sag Harbor earned praise from critics for its sensitive and detailed evocation of a particular moment in time and of the agonies and ecstasies of its teenage protagonist. "Whitehead has tapped the most classic summer-novel activity of all: nostalgia. It doesn't matter if nothing much happens in Sag Harbor.... The pleasure is in the way Whitehead recalls it, in loving and lingering detail," wrote Radhika Jones in Time. Adam Mansbach in the Boston Globe likewise noted, "It is Whitehead's most enjoyable book--warm and funny, carefully observed, and beautifully written, studded with small moments of pain and epiphany."

Whitehead's next novel was entirely different from anything he'd tried in the past. ZONE One was published in 2011 and focused on the rebuilding of Manhattan after a plague has struck and receded. Though many survived, many more died--and came back to life. Now the infected and the uninfected roam the same streets, but are not governed by the same laws. When asked why he chooses a different subject matter for each book, Whitehead told the Guardian, "I was a big horror and science fiction fan growing up. My brother and I would rent horror movies every weekend and in junior high I was reading Stephen King and Isaac Asimov. It was those guys who made me want to write in the first place, so it made sense to me that I would eventually do a horror novel, even if it seems strange going from a coming-of-age story like my last novel, Sag Harbor, to a zombie apocalypse. Zombies are a great rhetorical prop to talk about people and paranoia and they are a good vehicle for my misanthropy."

Whitehead's success as a novelist reached new heights with the publication of The Underground Railroad in 2016. In this work set in the pre-Civil War American South, Whitehead weaved a tale about an adolescent slave named Cora and her escape from bondage via the Underground Railroad. Unlike the real Underground Railroad, however, Whitehead's imagined version of the famous slavery escape route is a hidden network of actual rail lines and train cars that carry slaves to freedom. The Underground Railroad was a critical success that earned Whitehead the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and various other prestigious accolades.

On the heels of The Underground Railroad, Whitehead published an equally acclaimed novel called The Nickel Boys in 2019. Set in 1960s Tallahassee, The Nickel Boys details dramatic events in the life of Elwood Curtis, a young African American who is unjustly sentenced to time in the notorious Nickel Academy juvenile reformatory. Based on the true story of the infamous Dozier School for Boys, The Nickel Boys was another critical success that again earned Whitehead the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Whitehead has garnered many accolades for his fiction. In 2000 he received the Whiting Writers' Award, which is given each year to the most promising emerging writers, and in 2002 the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named Whitehead as one of its twenty-four fellows. The prestigious "genius grant," as it is known, recognizes individuals who demonstrate exceptional creativity, insight, and potential. The fellowship comes with a $500,000 award, paid out over five years, which may be used in any way the recipient chooses. Lee noted that the MacArthur Foundation singled out Whitehead as a "bold experimental writer whose social and philosophical themes speak to the heart of American society." As his career continued, Whitehead won many additional awards and honors, including the National Book Award for Fiction (2016), the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction (2017), the Booker Prize (2017), and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (2017). In receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in both 2017 and 2019, Whitehead notably became only the fourth novelist in history to win that prestigious award twice.

PERSONAL INFORMATION:

Born in 1969 in New York, NY; son of Arch Whitehead and Mary Ann Whitehead; married Natasha Stovall in 2000; children: Madeline. Education: Harvard University, BA, English, 1991. Addresses: Web--http://www.colsonwhitehead.com.

AWARDS:

New Voices Award, Quality Paperback Club, 1999; Whiting Writers' Award, 2000; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, 2002; Young Lions Fiction Award, New York Public Library, 2002; National Book Award for Fiction, 2016; Booker Prize, 2017; Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2017, 2020.

WORKS:

The Intuitionist, Anchor Books, 1999.

John Henry Days, Doubleday, 2001.

The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts, Doubleday, 2003.

Apex Hides the Hurt, Doubleday, 2006.

Sag Harbor, Doubleday, 2009.

ZONE One: A Novel, Doubleday, 2011.

The Underground Railroad, Doubleday, 2016.

The Nickel Boys, Doubleday, 2019.

FURTHER READINGS:

Periodicals

Booklist, December 1, 1998.

Boston Globe, April 26, 2009.

New York Times, February 7, 1999; May 13, 2001; September 25, 2002; April 27, 2009.

Publishers Weekly, November 16, 1998.

Time, April 23, 2009.

Time Out New York, April 23-29, 2009.

Online

"Bio," Colson Whitehead, https://www.colsonwhitehead.com/new-page (May 14, 2020).

Fox, Killian. "Colson Whitehead: 'Zombies are a good vehicle for my misanthropy,'" the Guardian, November 26, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/27/colson-whitehead-interview-five-minutes (accessed December 9, 2011).

Nolan, Tom, "What's in a Name: Colson Whitehead on Apex Hides the Hurt," American Booksellers Association, March 21, 2006, http://news.bookweb.org/features/4284.html (accessed June 5, 2009).

"The Underground Railroad," Penguin Random House, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/232365/the-underground-railroad-by-colson-whitehead/ (May 14, 2020).

"The Nickel Boys," Penguin Random House, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/223161/the-nickel-boys-by-colson-whitehead/ (May 14, 2020).

Source Citation

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Colson Whitehead is one of the most prominent writers on the literary scene today. A regular on the New York Times best books list, Whitehead has been compared to such authors as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Thomas Pynchon.

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For rights inquiries, please contact Brooks Sherman of Janklow & Nesbit at bsherman@janklow.com

Short Bio (68 words):

Angie Thomas was born, raised, and still lives in Jackson, Mississippi. A former teen rapper, she holds a BFA in creative writing from Belhaven University. Her award-winning, acclaimed debut novel, The Hate U Give, is a #1 New York Times bestseller and major motion picture from Fox 2000, starring Amandla Stenberg and directed by George Tillman, Jr. Her second novel, On the Come Up, is on sale now.

Long Bio (125 words):

Angie Thomas was born, raised, and still resides in Jackson, Mississippi as indicated by her accent. She is a former teen rapper whose greatest accomplishment was an article about her in Right-On Magazine with a picture included. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Belhaven University and an unofficial degree in Hip Hop. She can also still rap if needed. She is an inaugural winner of the Walter Dean Myers Grant 2015, awarded by We Need Diverse Books. Her award-winning, acclaimed debut novel, The Hate U Give, is a #1 New York Times bestseller and major motion picture from Fox 2000, starring Amandla Stenberg and directed by George Tillman, Jr. Her second novel, On the Come Up, is on sale now.

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For rights inquiries, please contact Brooks Sherman of Janklow & Nesbit at bsherman@janklow.com Short Bio (68 words): Angie Thomas was born, raised, and still lives in Jackson, Mississippi. A former teen rapper, she holds a BFA in creative writing from Belhaven University.

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Bio

Colson Whitehead was born in 1969, and was raised in Manhattan.

After graduating from Harvard College, he started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, books, and music.

His first novel, The Intuitionist, concerned intrigue in the Department of Elevator Inspectors, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award.

John Henry Days followed in 2001, an investigation of the steel-driving man of American folklore. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. The novel received the Young Lions Fiction Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

The Colossus of New York is a book of essays about the city. It was published in 2003 and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) is a novel about a "nomenclature consultant" who gets an assignment to name a town, and was a recipient of the PEN/Oakland Award.

Sag Harbor, published in 2009, is a novel about teenagers hanging out in Sag Harbor, Long Island during the summer of 1985. It was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.

Zone One (2011), about post-apocalyptic New York City, was a New York Times Bestseller.

The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky & Death, a non-fiction account of the 2011 World Series of Poker, appeared in 2014.

The Underground Railroad, a novel, was published in the summer of 2016. It won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Carnegie Medal for Fiction, and was a #1 New York Times Bestseller.

The Nickel Boys is a novel inspired by the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida. It won the Pulitzer Prize, the Kirkus Prize, and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

Harlem Shuffle, the first book in the Harlem Trilogy, was published in September 2021. Crook Manifesto, the second installment, will appear in 2023.

Colson Whitehead's reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications, such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper's and Granta.

He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, A Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Dos Passos Prize, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

In 2018, New York State named him their New York State Author, and in 2020 the Library of Congress awarded him their Prize for American Fiction.

He has taught at the University of Houston, Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, New York University, Princeton University, Wesleyan University, and been a Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College, the University of Richmond, and the University of Wyoming. Apparently he can't keep a job.

He lives in New York City.

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Colson Whitehead was born in 1969, and was raised in Manhattan. After graduating from Harvard College, he started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, books, and music. His first novel, The Intuitionist, concerned intrigue in the Department of Elevator Inspectors, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award.

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Nic Stone was born and raised in a suburb of Atlanta, GA, and the only thing she loves more than an adventure is a good story about one. After graduating from Spelman College, she worked extensively in teen mentoring and lived in Israel for a few years before returning to the US to write full-time.

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The recent acts of violence perpetrated against Black communities has led many to question racism and racial injustice embedded in American society. Stanford scholars have been looking for ways to reduce racial disparities and how to create meaningful change.

The tragic deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky have shown the world how deeply embedded racial injustice and racism are in the social fabric of the United States.

These recent acts of violence have raised a set of complex and challenging questions about inequality in our society: Why are Black Americans repeatedly targeted by the police? What can be done to stop further atrocities against minority communities from occurring? As some protests against these deaths turn violent, are political protests and demonstrations an effective way to instigate change? How can we build a more just society?

These important questions are among the subjects of Stanford scholars' work. Some researchers have worked with police agencies to develop recommendations for how officers can build safer and stronger relationships with the communities they serve. Others have examined what makes some political protests effective and why others turn violent. Researchers have also looked at how racial injustice cuts across other parts of society - such as schools and workplaces - and what can be done to reduce disparities. Here is some of that research and more.

In his new book, Science in the City, Stanford education professor Bryan A. Brown helps bridge the gap between students' culture and the science classroom.

A lab in the Psychology Department at Stanford has created a set of free toolkits to help people resolve complicated issues, including resources to help people deal with disagreements.

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Stanford scholars examine racism, social change and how to build a more just future | Stanford News

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The recent acts of violence perpetrated against Black communities has led many to question racism and racial injustice embedded in American society. Stanford scholars have been looking for ways to reduce racial disparities and how to create meaningful change.

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Mr. Stevenson is a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated, and the condemned.

Bryan Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults.

Mr. Stevenson has argued and won multiple cases at the United States Supreme Court, including a 2019 ruling protecting condemned prisoners who suffer from dementia and a landmark 2012 ruling that banned mandatory life-imprisonment-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger. Mr. Stevenson and his staff have won reversals, relief, or release from prison for over 140 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row and won relief for hundreds of others wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced.

Mr. Stevenson has initiated major new anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts that challenge inequality in America. He led the creation of two highly acclaimed cultural sites which opened in 2018: the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. These new national landmark institutions chronicle the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation, and the connection to mass incarceration and contemporary issues of racial bias.

Mr. Stevenson's work has won him numerous awards including the prestigious MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Prize; the ABA Medal, the American Bar Association's highest honor; the National Medal of Liberty from the American Civil Liberties Union after he was nominated by United States Supreme Court Justice John Stevens; the Public Interest Lawyer of the Year by the National Association of Public Interest Lawyers; and the Olaf Palme Prize in Stockholm, Sweden for international human rights. In 2002, he received the Alabama State Bar Commissioners Award. In 2003, the SALT Human Rights Award was presented to Mr. Stevenson by the Society of American Law Teachers. In 2004, he received the Award for Courageous Advocacy from the American College of Trial Lawyers and also the Lawyer for the People Award from the National Lawyers Guild. In 2006 New York University presented Mr. Stevenson with its Distinguished Teaching Award. Mr. Stevenson won the Gruber Foundation International Justice Prize and was awarded the NAACP William Robert Ming Advocacy Award, the National Legal Aid & Defender Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award and the Roosevelt Institute Franklin D. Roosevelt Freedom from Fear Award. In 2012, Mr. Stevenson received the American Psychiatric Association Human Rights Award, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Fred L. Shuttlesworth Award, and the Smithsonian Magazine American Ingenuity Award in Social Progress. Mr. Stevenson was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2014 and won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. In 2015, he was named to the Time 100 recognizing the world's most influential people. In 2016, he received the American Bar Association's Thurgood Marshall Award. He was named in Fortune's 2016 and 2017 World's Greatest Leaders list. He received the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize, from the King Center in Atlanta in 2018. In 2020, he received the Right Livelihood Award from The Right Livelihood Foundation in Sweden. In 2023, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden.

Mr. Stevenson has received over 50 honorary doctoral degrees, including degrees from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Oxford University. He is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller, Just Mercy, which was named by Time Magazine as one of the 10 Best Books of Nonfiction for 2014 and has been awarded several honors, including the American Library Association's Carnegie Medal for best nonfiction book of 2015 and a 2015 NAACP Image Award. Just Mercy was adapted as a major motion picture and the film won the American Bar Association's 2020 Silver Gavel Award as well as four NAACP Image Awards. Mr. Stevenson is also the subject of the Emmy Award-winning HBO documentary True Justice. He is a graduate of the Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Government.

Just Mercy

A powerful true story about the Equal Justice Initiative, the people we represent, and the importance of confronting injustice, Just Mercy is a bestselling book by Bryan Stevenson that has been adapted into a feature film.

True Justice

This HBO documentary follows Bryan Stevenson and EJI's struggle to create greater fairness in the criminal justice system. It reveals how racial injustice emerged, evolved, and continues to threaten America and challenges viewers to confront it.

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Bryan Stevenson | Equal Justice Initiative

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Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative.

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Brandon Leake Will Make You EMOTIONAL With His Spoken Word - America's Got Talent 2020

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                                       Kris Sy 

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5 charts reveal key racial inequality gaps in the US

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Five charts reveal gaps across a range of sectors, including educational achievement, employment and life expectancy.