Alan is an award-winning journalist, author of six books, and a frequent contributor to The Washington Post. As a reporter with the Louisville Courier-Journal, he was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service. His work for the Las Vegas Review-Journal on police shootings and indigent defense garnered national acclaim. He started his professional writing career as a news assistant and sportswriter in the Berlin bureau of The New York Times. He is currently an investigator for Centurion, a Princeton, NJ-based nonprofit that works to free wrongfully convicted prisoners. 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." He is a Philadelphia native and a graduate of Brown University.