The Cornell Club of Monmouth & Ocean Counties is excited to welcome this year’s fall alumni speaker, Keri Blakinger ’11, BA’14 who will be discussing her new memoir, ‘Corrections in Ink‘. The New York Times called Keri’s book a “brave, brutal memoir†and a “riveting story about suffering, recovery, and redemption,…†She was recently featured in the July edition of Cornellians. 

Keri is now a journalist and investigative reporter covering criminal justice for the Marshall Project, and will be joined by her colleague, Maurice Chammah ’10 to discuss her experience at Cornell, her memoir, her career, and to  answer questions from the audience. Don’t miss it!

Event Details:
Date: Wednesday, October 19th, 2022
Time: 7:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Location: Zoom

‘Corrections in Ink‘

“Keri Blakinger always lived life at full throttle. Growing up, that meant throwing herself into competitive figure skating with an all-consuming passion that led her to nationals. But when her skating career suddenly fell apart, that meant diving into self-destruction with the intensity she once saved for the ice. For 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. Then, on a cold day during her senior year, the police caught her walking down the street with a Tupperware full of heroin. Her arrest made the front page of the local news and landed her behind bars for nearly two years. 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. Along the way, she met women from all walks of life―who were all struggling through the same upside-down world of corrections. As the days ticked by, Keri came to understand how broken the justice system is and who that brokenness hurts the most. After 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. Written with searing intensity, unflinching honesty, and shocks of humor, Corrections in Ink uncovers that dark, brutal system that affects us all. 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.” – Blurb extract from Amazon.com

Support our scholarship!

CCMO has awarded scholarships to local Cornell students for over 25 years. If you’d like to make a gift to our scholarship, please do so here.