Joshua Sharpe
Joshua William Sharpe is an Atlanta-based 2021 Livingston Award-winning journalist whose stories have helped free two innocent people from incarceration and exposed deadly government failures. He has co-produced and edited two documentaries, including “The Imperfect Alibi,” which is about his investigation into the 1985 murders of a couple inside their historic Black church in rural Georgia. In early 2021, Joshua published a feature in The Atlantic about his experience with traumatic car wrecks, including a 2018 crash in which he broke both legs, forcing him to spend months in a hospital bed and then learn to walk again. Joshua also writes songs and plays guitar, banjo and pedal steel guitar.
While a fellow at the Logan Nonfiction Program, Joshua will focus on his book “The Man No One Believed: Race, Murder, Corruption and the Power of Lies in the Rural South,” about the still-unfolding aftermath of the aforementioned 1985 murders. His reporting uncovered new evidence that led to the release of Dennis Perry, who had been wrongfully convicted of the murders and was serving two life sentences. Joshua details how police investigators, attorneys, activists and, ultimately, Joshua himself proved Perry’s innocence. The book will be published by W.W. Norton.