Darrell B. Grayson

Darrell B. Grayson (1961–2007) was sentenced to death by an all-white jury in Alabama at age nineteen. A high school dropout, he began to write poetry while awaiting execution at Holman Prison. In 1994 he joined Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, the only resident-generated 501c3 in the nation founded and run by people on death row, and served as chairman from 2000 until his execution in 2007. The state of Alabama denied requests for DNA testing that might have proved Grayson’s innocence. Grayson’s work will also appear in the collection On Wings of Hope: Voices from Alabama’s Death Row (Vanderbilt University Press, forthcoming), edited by Katie Owens-Murphy.