Criminal justice, sports, rural affairs
Urban affairs, rural affairs, criminal justice, sports
Alan graduated with distinction from Brown University and received a Fulbright fellowship. During his time as an undergraduate, he also studied at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.
Alan is an award-winning journalist and author. As a reporter with the Louisville Courier-Journal, he was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for a series about gaping holes in Kentucky's justice system. His work for the Las Vegas Review-Journal on police shootings and the court system garnered national awards and acclaim. In 2010, he was the only journalist in the country to speak at a U.S. Department of Justice symposium on indigent defense. He started his professional writing career as a news assistant and reporter in the Berlin bureau of The New York Times. His first assignment there resulted in a Sunday A1 story about the tragic legacy of the doping of female swimmers in the former East Germany. Alan is a Philadelphia native and a graduate of Brown University, where he majored in German and Comparative Literature and received a Fulbright scholarship to study and work in Austria.
Alan is the author/co-author of six sports books five published by Triumph Books and one published by McFarland & Company. His biography of baseball player Shane Victorino chronicles how a young man from Maui overcame geographic isolation and a cognitive disorder to reach the pinnacle of his profession. A memoir he co-authored with baseball legend Dallas Green explores Green’s attempts to come to cope with the death of his young granddaughter, who was shot and killed in Tucson, Ariz. during a 2011 assassination attempt on Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
Alan is currently an investigator for Centurion, a Princeton, NJ-based nonprofit that to date has freed 64 wrongfully convicted prisoners across
the country. His recent efforts to exonerate a New Orleans man who was serving a life sentence for a murder he didn't commit gained praise from
The New Orleans Advocate,
which wrote that his investigation led the local district attorney to make his "most full-throated admission ever that his office got it wrong in a murder case."
Alan is an experienced author and co-writer of memoirs. He has a strong track record of collaboration with subjects of all work styles, personality types, and voices. Each of his co-written memoirs emphasizes vibrant storytelling and contains deeply researched portions about family history.