Thomas Bartlett Whitaker is serving a life sentence in Texas. He spent eleven years on Texas’s Death Row before being granted clemency in February 2018. After entering prison, he earned an undergraduate degree, and he completed his master’s degree during his last months on Death Row. He has won first place three times for fiction and essay in the PEN Prison Writing Contest, and he received an inaugural PEN Writing for Justice Fellowship in 2018. More than 150 pieces of his writing have been published on Minutes Before Six, the nonprofit website project he founded in 2007 upon his arrival in prison.