Keri Blakinger
Journalist documenting the impacts of death row, both inside and outside of prison.
Keri Blakinger is a criminal justice reporter for the Los Angeles Times and author of the critically acclaimed 2022 memoir Corrections in Ink, about the two years she spent at a women’s prison in New York and her life after incarceration. She has written extensively about prisons and the death penalty, and in 2024, she was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her magazine feature on the Dungeons & Dragons players of Texas death row.
Prior to the Los Angeles Times, Blakinger worked at the Marshall Project, where she was the organization’s first formerly incarcerated reporter. Before that she wrote about criminal justice for the Houston Chronicle, and in 2017, she was part of the paper’s team covering Hurricane Harvey, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. In 2018 her investigation into dental care in Texas prisons led to systemic change when the state reversed a longstanding policy and began providing dentures for toothless prisoners. Her work has also appeared in NBC News, BBC, VICE News, and the Washington Post Magazine, where her 2019 feature on women’s jails was part of the publication’s National Magazine award-winning October issue.
As an Emerson Collective Fellow at New America, Blakinger is expanding her piece about Dungeons & Dragons players into a book-length examination of the intense isolation of death row, the stubborn humanity of the people who find themselves confined to it, and societal implications of legally sanctioning such deprivation.