Join us for an event featuting Phoebe Zerwick, author of Beyond Innocence and Joe Neff, an NC investigative journalist for The Marshall Project. This event is a free event, but registration is required. Click here to register. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event. Pre-order Fitz and Cleo Get Creative from Malaprop’s to get a signed and personalized copy. Please request signing and/or personalization in the “comments” section during checkout.
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Darryl Hunt is a seminal figure in the annals of wrongful convictions, both for what he endured and for his remarkable legacy. A young Black man falsely accused of murdering a white woman in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and sentenced to life in prison, he spent 19 years behind bars before his tireless attorneys were able to prove his innocence. After his exoneration in 2004, as depicted in the acclaimed documentary, The Trials of Darryl Hunt, Hunt became a national advocate for social justice, devoted himself to alleviating the “civil death” almost every ex-prisoner faces upon re-entry into society, and in time inspired lasting reforms, among them a law that allows those on death row to appeal their sentence with evidence of racial bias and a state agency unique to North Carolina that investigates and adjudicates claims of innocence. He was a beacon of hope for so many—until he could no longer bear the burden of the injustice he had experienced and in 2016 took his own life.
Phoebe Zerwick had investigated Hunt’s case as a newspaper reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal in a series of articles that led to his DNA exoneration. Deeply troubled at his death by the idea that she and others who fought for Hunt’s freedom had missed something, she set out to understand the full story of Hunt’s life. In BEYOND INNOCENCE Zerwick restores the humanity of an extraordinary man who had wanted nothing more than to live a decent life, whose story should inspire us all.
Phoebe Zerwick is an award-winning investigative journalist, narrative writer, and college professor. Her writing has appeared in O Magazine, National Geographic, The Nation, Winston-Salem Journal, and Glamour, among other publications. Her work has been recognized by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, Investigative Reporters, and Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, Columbia University, and the North Carolina Press Association, and featured in the HBO documentary The Trials of Darryl Hunt. She is the director of the journalism program at Wake Forest University.