When
Speaker Bios:
Ian Manuel began stealing cars at age 11, and at age 13, committed the crime for which he would be sentenced to die in prison. In the course of a botched mugging, and at the direction of several older boys, he shot a white woman in the jaw. After turning himself in and pleading guilty, Manuel became one of the 73 children identified by the Equal Justice Initiative who have been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in the United States—the only country in the world known to issue sentences of this kind to children.
The Equal Justice Initiative succeeded in vacating Manuel’s sentence in 2010, and he was released in 2016. Now a free man, Manuel is a fierce advocate for criminal justice reform and for the reintegration of those who have recently been released from prison.
In My Time Will Come: A Memoir of Crime, Punishment, Hope, and Redemption, Manuel takes readers through his equally wrenching and inspiring story, from his upbringing as a poor Black kid from Florida, to the violent incident that changed the trajectory of his life, to the story of his redemption.
Manuel performs spoken word poetry and was a 2017 MacDowell Fellow for nonfiction literature. He lives in New York City.
Christopher P. Wolfe SOA’18 is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at the Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights. Chris graduated from the United States Military Academy (West Point) in 2000 and served as a Field Artillery officer in the U.S. Army for six years. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for meritorious service in a combat zone. After completing military service, Chris earned his MBA with a concentration in Investment Finance from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and worked on Wall Street as an investment banker during the height of the financial crisis. After five years on Wall Street, Chris earned his MFA from Columbia University in creative writing as a fiction concentrator. At Columbia, he was an instructor for The Columbia Veterans Creative Writing Workshop and was selected for the School of the Arts Teaching Fellowship.
Chris currently teaches creative writing at Rikers Island to incarcerated students as a part of Columbia University’s Justice-In-Education Initiative. His writing has been featured in the BOMB Magazine, Guernica, The New York Times Magazine and two anthologies including The Road Ahead: Fiction from the Forever War and The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers. In addition to serving as the Artist-in-Residence at the Holder Initiative, Chris has been appointed as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Columbia University’s School of the Arts Writing Program.