Kevin James biography
Kevin James worked as New York City firefighter and supervising fire marshal from 1981 to 2002. He collaborated with elected officials and NGOs in passing the first ‘fire-safe’ cigarette legislation in the United States. He was accepted into the Revson Fellows program at Columbia University after retiring from the Fire Department in 2002, and was one of several American Muslims profiled in the 2002 PBS documentary Muhammad, Legacy of a Prophet. He was accepted into Columbia Law School in 2004, during which he interned with the Center for Constitutional Rights as an Ella Baker Fellow where he assisted in finding legal counsel for Guantanamo detainees. His major writing credit focused on Mahmoud Taha, a Sufi religious leader who was executed as an apostate in the Sudan in 1985. Mr. James graduated from Columbia as a Stone Scholar in 2007, and attended the 2011 White House Iftar Dinner hosted by President Barack Obama during Ramadan.
