Cleary Wolters

Cleary Wolters is the real-life inspiration for Laura Prepon's character Alex Vause in the award-winning Netflix series Orange Is the New Black (and Nora Jansen in Piper Kerman's bestselling memoir of the same name). During her six years in a Dublin, California prison for conspiracy to import heroin, Wolters wrote fiction and taught computer skills to fellow inmates. After she was was paroled, in 2008, she returned to her hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio and re-entered her profession of software engineering. In her spare time, she chronicled her journey from Catholic schoolgirl to drug smuggler to prisoner. Her memoir, Out of Orange, was published by HarperOne in 2015. Newsweek describes it as "...written in wry, honest prose like, 'There is nothing ambiguous about an erection.' In Out of Orange, one can see Cleary now, and fans of the show won't be disappointed." Cleary is a software test engineer and is pursuing a Ph D in Information Assurance and Security.