Keri Blakinger is a criminal justice reporter for the Los Angeles Times and author of the critically acclaimed 2022 memoir Corrections in Ink. 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. Prior to that she wrote about criminal justice for the Houston Chronicle, and in 2017, she was part of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize finalist team covering Hurricane Harvey. 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. Blakinger’s first book, a memoir, focused on the two years she spent in a women’s prison in New York and her life after incarceration. Her current project focuses on the Dungeons & Dragons players of death row.
Selected Work
- The Dungeons & Dragons Players of Death Row: A narrative feature published in the New York Times Magazine and the Marshall Project that tells the story of men on Texas death row who found community through fantasy gaming.