When Piper Kerman was sent to prison for a ten-year-old crime, she barely resembled the reckless young woman she’d been when, shortly after graduating Smith College, she’d committed the misdeeds that would eventually catch up with her.Happily ensconced in a New York City apartment, with a promising career and an attentive boyfriend, she was suddenly forced to reckon with the consequences of her very brief, very careless dalliance in the world of drug trafficking. Kerman spent thirteen months in prison, eleven of them at the infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, where she met a surprising and varied community of women living under exceptional circumstances. In Orange Is the New Black, Kerman tells the story of those long months locked up in a place with its own codes of behavior and arbitrary hierarchies, where a practical joke is as common as an unprovoked fight, and where the uneasy relationship between prisoner and jailer is constantly and unpredictably recalibrated.

Piper Kerman is now a vice president at a Washington, D.C.-based communications firm that works with foundations and nonprofits. A graduate of Smith College, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband.

Interviewed by Ross Rojek

Stephen Elliott is the author of seven books, including The Adderall Diaries (September 2009) and Happy Baby, a finalist for the New York Public Library‘s Young Lion Award, as well as a best book of 2004 in Salon.com, Newsday, Chicago New City, the Journal News, and the Village Voice. In addition to writing fiction, he frequently writes on politics. In 2004, he wrote Looking Forward To It, about the quest for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Elliott’s writing has been featured in Esquire, The New York Times, GQ, Best American Non-Required Reading 2005 and 2007, Best American Erotica, and Best Sex Writing 2006. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and is a member of the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto. He is the editor of The Rumpus.

Visit Stephen’s website at http://www.stephenelliott.com.

Click HERE to read our review of The Adderall Diaries.

Interviewed by Ross Rojek

Doesn’t the world deserve a dark comedy about medical tourism? Well, now it has one:Larry’s Kidney — the true story of How Daniel Asa Rose found himself in China with his black-sheep cousin and his mail-order bride, skirting the law to find a transplant…and save his life.

Read SBR’s review of Larry’s Kidney.