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
Only a man who came within three days of being executed for a crime he didn’t commit could be as passionate an advocate for a death-penalty moratorium as former death row inmate Randall Dale Adams.
For teenage girls in the Hill Country town of Llano, life can be short on glamour and excitement—except at the annual rodeo, when one of them gets a rhinestone tiara and a rare, thrilling moment of glory.
Senior editor Pamela Colloff, who trailed five young women as they vied for the title of rodeo queen, talks about small towns and big dreams.
After spending a week at the busiest U.S. Border Patrol station in Texas, associate editor Pamela Colloff learned that there is more to an agent's job than helicopters and surveillance cameras.
In Maverick County illegal immigrants are crossing in record numbers, creating a war zone. Mexicans have been shot and killed, houses robbed, cattle stolen. Some ranchers are fleeing. But others, like Dob Cunningham, have decided to stay and fight.
Associate editor Pamela Colloff tells the story behind November's cover story, "They Haven't Got a Prayer."
In the Gulf Coast town of Santa Fe, high school football games had always kicked off with a prayer, but in June the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the practice violated the separation of church and state. Now the issuewhich has turned neighbor against neighbor and provoked some decidedly un-Christian behavior has grown from a local controversy into a national one.
Susan Dell, the wife of Michael and the owner of a
pricey couture salon that bears her name, is the
perfect symbol of the new, mega-monied Austin. So
what if its thunderstruck natives don't know quite what
to make of her? Meet the Capital City's designing
woman.
From a boutique hotel in hip South Austin to a bed-and-breakfast across the Mexican border, from fly fishing on the Llano River to bathing in the Chinati Hot Springs, 33 getaways the guidebooks don’t tell you about, courtesy of our intrepid staff of weekend warriors.