Remain Free: An Author Talk with GAUTAM NARULA

In 2011, Troy Anthony Davis, a black man convicted of murdering white police officer Mark MacPhail in cold blood, was the world’s most famous death row inmate. In the twenty-two years since the murder, Davis had faced four execution dates. The day after one of those execution dates, a fifteen-year-old named Gautam Narula wrote Davis a letter.

In his award-winning memoir Remain Free, Gautam Narula details his unlikely friendship with Troy Davis, a man wrongfully accused of killing a police officer. Drawing upon hundreds of hours of conversations, letters, and personal visits, the memoir explores the issues that plague the criminal justice system. Remain Free is a brutally honest expression of humanity existing in even the darkest of places.

Gautam Narula is a writer and software engineer. He is the author of Chess For the Novice Player (2010) and Remain Free (2015), for which he won the Georgia Author of the Year Award at the age of 22. He is also the recipient of the New England Choice Awards Youth Leadership Award, the University of Georgia Foundation Fellowship, the National Merit Scholarship, and was an alternate for the 2013 Thiel Fellowship. Gautam has also written for the Georgia Political Review and Tech Emergence, and spoken to audiences at MIT, Cornell University, Georgia State University Law School, and The Moth Mainstage.

Co-hosted by the Boston Public Library, Kavita Chhibber.com, and the South Asian Arts and Cultural Council.