Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer, human rights activist, law professor at the New York University School of Law, and author of Just Mercy, his memoir about working with prisoners on death row and other unjustly incarcerated individuals. Stevenson was born in Milton, Delaware, in 1959. His father worked as a lab technician at a food-processing plant and his mother was an equal-opportunity officer at the local Air Force base. He and his family attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which he later credited as influencing his views on life, justice, and resilience (Barrett, Paul. “Bryan Stevenson’s Death Defying Acts.” NYU Law Magazine, 2007).

Stevenson earned his BA in philosophy from Eastern University in St. David, Pennsylvania, in 1981. He then earned an MA in public policy and a JD from Harvard. During this time, he interned with the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia, which inspired him to help prisoners on death row and fight against inequality, injustice, and cruelty in the legal system.

After graduating from Harvard in 1985, he returned to working with the Southern Center for Human Rights, where he took on many of the cases recounted in Just Mercy, including the now-infamous McClesky v.