Kevin D Sawyer is an African American native of San Francisco, California, born in 1963. Sawyer is the former associate editor of San Quentin News and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists. Sawyer is a 2024 Stillwater Award recipient for a Best News story, a 2019 PEN America Honorable Mention for nonfiction, a 2016 recipient of the James Aronson Award for Exemplary Community Journalism, and he was on the SQ News team that won SPJ’s 2014 James Madison Freedom of Information Award. Prior to incarceration, Sawyer worked for 14 years in the telecommunications industry. He is a certified electrician, a trained audio engineer with a Bachelor of Arts degree in mass communication. Sawyer’s work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland Post, UCLA Law Review (Discourse), Columbia Journalism Review, Prison Journalism Project, Cal Matters, Bay City News, the News Station, El Tecolote, Filter Magazine, Harvard Journal of African American Policy, the Guardian, and many more.