An Evening with Piper Kerman, Author of Orange Is the New Black

On Wednesday, March 4, at 7 p.m., Kerman will be our speaker at Arts & Culture. Now a prominent crusader for criminal justice and prison reform, she will discuss her own experience and how it relates to mass incarceration in America and increasing state violence. She’ll also detail what she calls “the curious process” of adapting her memoir into the groundbreaking Netflix series and talk about her work teaching writing in a men’s state prison, the subject of her next book.

Now a prominent crusader for criminal justice & prison reform, she will discuss her own experience & how it relates to mass incarceration.

Even if you were not among the 105 million people who watched at least one episode of the Netflix series Orange is the New Black, you probably heard about it. The record-breaking, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning show ran for seven seasons, starting in 2013.

This unflinching series about incarcerated women was based on Piper Kerman’s best-selling memoir, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison. The book chronicles her 13 months as an inmate in a minimum-security federal prison after she had been convicted of charges related to drug trafficking.