Quick Facts
Biography
Jamie Pastor Bolnick is an American writer, journalist, and photographer.
Bolnick was born in Huntington, Long Island, New York. She attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City and began acting professionally while still a teenager. After the arrival of her children, Britt and Piers, she worked as a journalist and photographer.
Her work has appeared in magazines and newspapers, including Redbook, Interview Magazine, New York Newsday, and The New York Daily News. She is the author of two non-fiction books and is working on a third.
Jamie's two nonfiction works are both based on the lives of women who struggled with serious issues—mental retardation and drug abuse—and triumphed over them. Both are written as first-person narratives in the voice of the subject, and both were the product of intimate interaction with the women whose stories are told in these works.
The first, Winnie: “My Life in the Institution” – A Memoir of a Special Woman, published in 1985, is based on Winnie's short written account of her life, supplemented by the transcripts of hundreds of hours of taped interview.
In 1988—with support from Bette Midler—Winnie was made into an NBC-TV Movie of the Week starring Meredith Baxter Birney and David Morse.
A new edition of Winnie, revised and expanded, is in preparation, and was released in 2010.
The second, Living at the Edge of the World, published in 2000, is the true account of a homeless girl (Tina) who lived for four years in the tunnels of Grand Central Station. Tina becomes addicted to crack, is brutalized, and serves several jail terms for assault and robbery. After the suicide of her beloved friend, April, Tina fights her way back to the world of the living.
Living at the Edge of the World has been translated into Norwegian, Japanese, and Chinese, and was excerpted in Interview Magazine and The New York Daily News.
Jamie's current project is a book about the two Port Authority policemen who were the last to be rescued alive from the ruins of the World Trade Center on 9/11, told from their perspectives. The book's working title is 'Recovery'.