Jamie Pastor Bolnick

Who is Jamie Pastor Bolnick?

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.