Pamela Colloff
Pamela Colloff is an executive editor at Texas Monthly and has been writing for the magazine since 1997. Her work has also appeared in the New Yorker and has been anthologized in three editions of Best American Crime Reporting as well as the e-book collection, Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. Colloff is a four-time National Magazine Award finalist. She was nominated in 2001 for her article on school prayer, and then again in 2011 for her two-part series, “Innocence Lost” and “Innocence Found,” about wrongly convicted death row inmate Anthony Graves. One month after the publication of “Innocence Lost,” the Burleson County district attorney’s office dropped all charges against Graves and released him from jail, where he had been awaiting retrial. Colloff’s article—an exhaustive examination of Graves’s case—was credited with helping Graves win his freedom after eighteen years behind bars.
In 2013 she was nominated twice more, for “Hannah and Andrew” and “The Innocent Man,” a two-part series about Michael Morton, a man who spent 25 years wrongfully imprisoned for the brutal murder of his wife, Christine. The latter earned Colloff her first NMA.
Colloff holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Brown University and was raised in New York City. She lives in Austin with her husband and their two children.
Stories
Nearly two centuries after their forebears protected colonists from Indian raids, the Texas Rangers are alive and well and wrestling with the realities of the twenty-first century. In their own words, the iconic crime fighters explain how their world has changed—and what it takes to battle the latest generation of bad guys.
The short, slight, mentally disabled black man was found on the side of a road in Linden, huddled in a fetal position. He was bloody and unconscious—the victim of a violent crime. But another tragedy was how residents of the East Texas town reacted.
While politicians and bureaucrats endlessly debate the best ways to secure our borders, illegal immigrants are dying to get into America—literally.
At 11:48 a.m. on August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman began firing his rifle from the top of the University of Texas Tower at anyone and everyone in his sights. At 1:24 p.m., he was gunned down himself. The lives of the people who witnessed the sniper’s spree firsthand would never be the same again.
Every February, on the weekend of Presidents’ Day, the daughters of Laredo’s most prominent families are presented to society in dresses that cost $20,000 or more at a colonial pageant that is the party of the year.
The weekend after Thanksgiving, demonstrators gathered in Crawford and made their feelings about the war quite clear.
Forty-five years after Betty Williams was shot to death by the handsome football player she had been secretly seeing, her murder haunts her Odessa high school—literally.
Larry McMurtry writes about how if you’re forced to leave Texas before you’re ready, before the state lets you go, you always dream of it.
The letter-sweater-wearing, pom-pom-shaking, pep-rally-leading girl next door has been a beloved Texas icon for generations. So why do so many people today— lawmakers and lawyers, preachers and feminists—think cheerleading is the root, root, root of all evil?
When the girls’ basketball coach at the only high school in Bloomburg moved in with another woman, it cost her a job and at least a few friends. But the tumult over a lesbian relationship in this tiny East Texas town wasn’t the end of the story.
The demographics of one legislative district in Houston have changed so dramatically that they allowed a novice Democrat to unseat an eleven-term Republican powerhouse. But the real story is what could happen elsewhere in the not-so-distant future.
No one in McAllen saw Irene Garza leave Sacred Heart that night in 1960. The next morning, her car was still parked down the street from the church. She never came home.