Short answers, pulled from the story.
Kirk Wallace Johnson is an American author, screenwriter, and humanitarian. He is known for founding the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, writing the true crime book The Feather Thief, and serving as the U.S. Agency for International Development's first coordinator for reconstruction in Fallujah in 2005.
The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies is a non-profit organization Johnson founded after writing a December 2006 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. It marshaled hundreds of pro bono attorneys from top U.S. law firms to represent Iraqi refugees who had worked for the U.S. government during the Iraq War, helping more than 2,000 of them resettle in America over eight years.
The Feather Thief is a true crime book about Edwin Rist, an American flutist who stole remains of rare birds from the Natural History Museum in England. The stolen feathers were sought by hobbyists, including fly-fishers, who pay high prices for them. Johnson spent five years researching the case and interviewing Rist.
The Feather Thief was named an Amazon Best Book of 2018, shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award, and was a finalist for the 2019 Edgar Awards in the Best Fact Crime category. It also appeared on Oprah's list of the 20 Best True Crime Books of All Time.
In 2024, Johnson was one of three lead plaintiffs, alongside Andrea Bartz and Charles Graeber, in the largest class action lawsuit for intellectual property infringement in U.S. history. The suit was filed on behalf of tens of thousands of authors whose works were pirated by Anthropic AI. The settlement reached $1.5 billion, the largest recovery in U.S. copyright history.
Johnson is adapting The Feather Thief into a television series in development with Universal International Studios and Sue Naegle's Dinner Party Productions. The rights to The Fishermen and the Dragon were sold to George Clooney's production company for a multi-part series. A feature film called Last Flight, about the Fall of Kabul, is in development with director Babak Anvari and Benedict Cumberbatch starring.