Yusef Salaam author page

Yusef Salaam biography

Yusef Salaam is an author, inspirational speaker and prison abolitionist. At fifteen, he was one of five teenage boys wrongly convicted and sentenced to prison in the Central Park jogger case. In 1997, he left prison as an adult, and in 2002 the sentences of the Central Park Five were overturned and all five were exonerated.

Salaam speaks about the effects of incarceration and disenfranchisement. His advocacy and educational work addresses mass incarceration, police brutality and misconduct, press ethics and bias, race and law, and disparities in the criminal justice system, especially for men of colour.

Salaam co-authored the young adult verse novel Punching the Air with Ibi Zoboi. The book follows Amal Shahid, a Black Muslim sixteen-year-old artist and poet who is imprisoned after a wrongful conviction. HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray published Punching the Air on 1 September 2020.

Salaam wrote the memoir Better, Not Bitter: Living on Purpose in the Pursuit of Racial Justice. The book tells his individual story as one of the Exonerated Five and covers growing up Black in central Harlem in the 1980s, wrongful incarceration, re-entry and exoneration. Grand Central Publishing published the ebook edition on 18 May 2021.

A trade paperback edition of Better, Not Bitter was published by Grand Central Publishing on 17 May 2022 under the subtitle The Power of Hope and Living on Purpose.