Piper Kerman Biography

Piper Kerman describes her 15 months at the Danbury Correctional Facility for a crime she had committed 10 years earlier as a very brief, very irresponsible dalliance in the world of drug trafficking in her novel Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison. The accounts of the women she met while incarcerated are compelling, moving, and frequently hilarious. They raise questions about friendship and family, mental illness, strange cliques and codes of behavior, the role of religion, the tense relationship between prisoners and jailers, and the near-total lack of advice for life after prison. Jenji Kohan, the man behind Showtime's Weeds, turned the memoir into a Netflix original series of the same name, which was now given a second season. James Poniewozik, Time's TV critic, praised it for the stunningly matter-of-fact way it uses the prison to create one of TV's most racially and sexually diverse—and as important, complex—dramas and contrasts the power and class dynamics inside the prison with those outside the prison. The Washington Post called it the best TV show about prison ever made. The University of Tulsa, Roanoke College, Fairfield University, Salem State College, Rutgers University, New York Law School, and many more colleges and universities have hosted talks by Kerman. She has also addressed organizations including the Disproportionate Minority Confinement Task Force of the American Correctional Association, federal probation officers, public defenders, justice reform volunteers, and those who have been jailed in the past and present. She is a member of the Women's Prison Association's board.

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