Readers of his legal-affairs column in National Journal know that Stuart Taylor feels passionately about the Duke lacrosse-team rape case. His writings have been harshly critical of the prosecutor, police, and Duke officials. Now he is now working on a book for St. Martin’s Press chronicling the case through the planned trial next spring. The book’s title says it all: Innocent: The Rape of Duke’s Lacrosse Team by a Rogue DA, Bad Cops, Biased Journalists, and PC Academics.

“My confidence in the defendants’ innocence is based on six months spent studying all significant prosecution evidence—specifically, more than 2,000 pages of documents with no gaps in page numbering that have been provided by the prosecution to the defense as required by North Carolina’s broad discovery law,” he says.

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Few stay focused on their senior thesis after college, but Walt Whitman High School grad Sugi Ganeshananthan stuck by her novel at the urging of adviser and author Jamaica Kincaid.

Four years after getting an English degree from Harvard, Ganeshananthan, whose family is Sri Lankan, landed a two-book deal—including her thesis. Love Marriage, out in spring 2008, recounts the story and trials of several generations of a Sri Lankan family scattered across the world.

Her editor at Random House? Rebecca Shapiro, also Whitman ’98. The two met in kindergarten at Burning Tree Elementary.