Maryanne Vollers is an American author, journalist and ghostwriter. Her first book, Ghosts of Mississippi, was a finalist in non-fiction for the 1995 National Book Award.[1][2] Her many collaborations include the memoirs of Hillary Rodham Clinton,[3] Dr. Jerri Nielsen,[4] Sissy Spacek,[5] Ashley Judd,[6] and Billie Jean King.[7] Her second book on domestic terrorism, Lone Wolf: Eric Rudolph – Murder, Myth, and the Pursuit of an American Outlaw, was published in 2006.[8][9] A former editor at Rolling Stone [10] she has written articles for publications such as Esquire, GQ, Sports Illustrated, Time,[11] and The New York Times Magazine.[12]
Life
Vollers was born in Yorktown Heights, New York, the daughter of a New York City fire chief and a court clerk. She attended Yorktown High School, and graduated from Brown University in Providence, RI in 1977.[13] She has lived in Nairobi, Kenya, and Johannesburg, South Africa, where she worked as a Time magazine stringer, radio newscaster, and field producer for NBC News, covering wars, politics, health and cultural issues across the continent and around the world.[14]
Once back in the states, Vollers covered domestic terrorism, including articles on the Oklahoma City Bombing, the militia movement,[15] anti-abortion violence, the trial of white supremacist Byron de La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers, which resulted in her book, Ghosts of Mississippi, followed a decade later by Lone Wolf, on the Olympic Park and abortion clinic bomber, Eric Rudolph.[16]
Now based in Montana, she and her husband, documentary photographer, director, and producer William Campbell create news features and documentaries on political, social and environmental issues. Their PBS-ITVS documentary, Wolves in Paradise, was about the human costs and benefits of the reintroduction of wolves in the Yellowstone region.[17][18]
Work with Yeonmi Park
Vollers co-authored the biography of North Korean defector Yeonmi Park, whose claims about her life as a child in North Korea have been questioned by journalists, professors of Korean studies, and fellow North Korean defectors. The 2015 book titled In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom – written in English and published in the United States – contained a different and more negative account of her life in North Korea than the stories Park had previously told to audiences in South Korea.[19]
Before the book was published, an SBS journalist who had previously worked with Park on a documentary found numerous inconsistencies in Park's stories of life in Korea.[20] Vollers defended Park from these accusations, stating that most of Park's jumbled recollections were due to her not yet being fluent in English, and that she was being targeted by a North Korean government smear campaign.[21] A 2023 article in the The Washington Post similarly found inconsistencies in many of Park's stories about life in North Korea.[22]
