Jamal Joseph

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Jamal Joseph is a U.S. writer, director, producer, poet, activist, and educator. He was incarcerated from 1982 to 1989 in a federal prison for his active participation in the terrorist robbery of a Brinks armored car and the murder of killing two police officers, Edward O'Grady and Waverly Brown, and a Brinks guard, Peter Paige.

It is known that some accomplices in the murders escaped. Prosecutors failed to prove Joseph's active participation in the murders - which began with the cold blooded assassination of a minimum wage security guard and continued with the murder of O'Grady and Brown using M-16s at a police roadblock -- instead convicting him of being an accessory after the fact because he helped hide an associate, Mutulu Shakur, accused of carrying out the robbery. Shakur, father of the dead rapper Tupac Shakur, still resides at a federal "supermax" facility.

While in prison, Joseph earned two college degrees, and wrote five plays and two volumes of poetry -- all, in a manner of speaking, at taxpayer expense. He is currently a professor and Chair of Columbia University’s Graduate Film Division and the artistic director of the New Heritage Theater in Harlem. He has been featured on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, BET's American Gangster and on Tupac's Shakur's "The Rose That Grew From Concrete" Volumes 1 & 2. He is the author of the interactive biography on Tupac Shakur, Tupac Shakur Legacy.

Jamal Joseph is nominated for a 2008 Academy Award in the Best Song category for his contributions to the song "Raise It Up", performed by IMPACT Repertory Theatre and Jamia Nash in the 2007 film August Rush.