Wolters, Cleary

Cleary Wolters is the real-life inspiration for the character Nora Jansen in Piper Kerman's memoir and Alex Vause in the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. Piper spent thirteen months in a Danbury, Connecticut, minimum-security prison beginning in 2004. Cleary, meanwhile, was charged with conspiracy to import heroin and served almost six years in a Dublin, California, prison before being paroled in 2008. Cleary has written poetry, fiction, and screenplays, the bulk of which were written during her prison sentence. This is her first memoir and first published work.