Piper Kerman is an American memoirist.
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She graduated from Smith College, in 1992. In 1993, she became entangled with Nora, a lesbian who dealt heroin for a West African kingpin.[1][2] She laundered money for the operation.[1]
She moved to San Francisco, where she met Larry Smith; they moved to New York City. In 1998, she was indicted for money laundering and drug trafficking.[1] She pleaded guilty.[1] She served 13 months in 2004 and 2005, in a minimum security prison located in Danbury, Connecticut.[3]
In 2006, they married.[1] She works as a communications strategist for nonprofits.
Piper Kerman's memoir reveals how prison changed her life, and why warehousing people who commit crimes is such a waste of human potential.[2]
Piper Kerman -- the author of the frank and funny new memoir "Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison" -- will be the first person to tell you how lucky she is.[4]
Many of us have done something that could have gotten us arrested. The pot we smoked in college, the time we sold a couple of hits of ecstasy to a friend, even being in the room when a bigger drug deal went down could have sunk us. Had it gone just a little awry or had the wrong person shown up at the wrong time, we could be wearing that orange jumpsuit.[5]
In her memoir, Orange Is the New Black, a perky blond Smith grad named Piper Kerman describes the year that she spent incarcerated in Connecticut's Danbury Federal Correctional Institution. Resist the impulse to dismiss Kerman's book as The Preppy Handbook for the Club Fed crowd. Orange transcends the memoir genre's usual self-centeredness to explore how human beings can always surprise you. You'd expect bad behavior in prison. But it's the moments of joy, friendship and kindness that the author experienced that make Orange so moving and lovely.[6]
Diverting stuff, but not exactly literature. Kerman points out that most books set in prison are by and for men. It made me wish she'd found poet Irina Ratushinskaya's "Grey Is the Color of Hope," about four years as a Russian political prisoner. Despite its hokey title, it amounts to an Easter feast alongside Kerman's tasty junk food.[7]