John Grisham (Author)
Beginning with The Firm in 1991, John Grisham has published at least one #1 bestseller every year. His books have been translated into 45 languages and have sold over 350 million copies worldwide. Ten have been adapted to film, including The Firm, The Pelican Brief, and A Time To Kill. His Theodore Boone series for young readers is now in development at Netflix. An avid sports fan, he has written two novels about football, one about baseball, and in 2021 he published Sooley, a story set in the world of college basketball. His lone work of non-fiction, The Innocent Man, was adapted into a six-part Netflix docuseries.
He is the two-time winner of the Harper Lee Prize For Legal Fiction and was distinguished with the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award For Fiction.
When he's not writing, he serves on the Board of Directors of the Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries, two national organizations dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongfully convicted. Much of his recent fiction explores deep-seated problems in our criminal justice systems.
A graduate of Mississippi State University and Ole Miss Law School, he lives on a farm in central Virginia, around the corner from the youth baseball complex he built in 1996. He still serves as its Commissioner.
Jim McCloskey (Author)
In 1980 Jim McCloskey decided to leave the corporate world and enter the ministry. While a student chaplain at the Trenton State Prison he met George De Los Santos, a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder. Convinced of his innocence, McCloskey took on De Los Santos's case. His efforts led to Dos Los Santos's exoneration and release from prison in 1983. In the same year McCloskey founded Centurion Ministries, the first non-profit organisation in the world dedicated to freeing individuals who are wrongfully incarcerated. Since then Centurion has been responsible for 70 releases of men and women serving life or death sentences for crimes they did not commit.
McCloskey's memoir, WHEN TRUTH IS ALL YOU HAVE, was published in 2020 with a Foreword from John Grisham.
He retired from Centurion in 2015.