Best selling author and prison reform activist Piper Kerman was the keynote speaker for The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina's Power of the Purse luncheon on Tuesday. Her memoir, Orange is the New Black, chronicles Kerman's year in a minimum security women's prison, and is the basis for the popular Netflix series.
Kerman was a Smith College graduate in the early 90s, when she smuggled drug money over seas. The experience scared her and she moved back to the States and started a new life. But years later, her past would come to haunt her.