What I discovered, though, was that my experience was not at all atypical, that my students and I had had similar experiences and that they expected that I would be like every English teacher they had ever had. I asked, at least early in my teaching career, because my own high school English experience had been so miserable that I had concluded it must be an anomaly, and I wanted my students to set me straight. In the twenty-seven plus years that I have dutifully taught some version of college writing, one of my standard first-day get-to-know-each-other icebreaker questions has been “What do you remember most about high school English?” Not just a story about getting out and getting off drugs, this galvanizing memoir is about the power of second chances about who our society throws away and who we allow to reach for redemption―and how they reach for it.If you do not see the podcast player, click here to listen. Written with searing intensity, unflinching honesty, and shocks of humor, Corrections in Ink uncovers that dark, brutal system that affects us all. As the days ticked by, Keri came to understand how broken the justice system is and who that brokenness hurts the most.Īfter she walked out of her cell for the last time, Keri became a reporter dedicated to exposing our flawed prisons as only an insider could.
Along the way, she met women from all walks of life―who were all struggling through the same upside-down world of corrections. There, in the Twilight Zone of New York’s jails and prisons, Keri grappled with the wreckage of her missteps and mistakes as she sobered up and searched for a better path. Her arrest made the front page of the local news and landed her behind bars for nearly two years.
Then, on a cold day during her senior year, the police caught her walking down the street with a Tupperware full of heroin. But when her skating career suddenly fell apart, that meant diving into self-destruction with the intensity she once saved for the ice.įor the next nine years, Keri ricocheted from one dark place to the next: living on the streets, selling drugs and sex, and shooting up between classes all while trying to hold herself together enough to finish her degree at Cornell. Growing up, that meant throwing herself into competitive figure skating with an all-consuming passion that led her to nationals. Keri Blakinger always lived life at full throttle. An electric and unforgettable memoir about a young woman's journey―from the ice rink, to addiction and a prison sentence, to the newsroom―and how she emerged with a fierce determination to expose the broken system she experienced.
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