Printable Biography of Jeannette Walls

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Jeannette Walls was born in Phoenix, Arizona and her family lived in various southwestern towns before settling in Welch, West Virginia when she was ten. She graduated from Columbia University's Barnard College with honors and went on to become a reporter for New York magazine, Esquire, USA Today and MSNBC.com, where she currently works. She has appeared regularly on television, including the Today Show, CNN and PrimeTimeLive.  

Jeannette is also the author of a new memoir, The Glass Castle, which tells about her bizarre childhood, growing up in the desert southwest where she sometimes slept in cardboard boxes and in a coal mining town in West Virginia, where she lived in a house without an indoor bathroom. She left for New York when she was seventeen, only to have her parents follow her, where they eventually became homeless. Walls's memoir has been called "a story of precision and grace [carved out of] one of the most chaotic, heartbreaking stories ever to be set down on page." The Glass Castle has won numerous awards, is a New York Times bestseller and movie rights have been optioned by Paramount.

Jeannette lives in Virginia and is married to writer John Taylor.