Carol Menaker is a writer living in the Sierra Foothills in Northern California, where she retired after a career writing and managing communications for universities and nonprofits. She was raised in a Jewish family in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She holds a BA in theatre arts/acting from Pennsylvania State University and an MS in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Her book is coming out April 11. The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done: One Juror’s Reckoning with Racial Injustice is Carol Menaker’s intimate and eye-opening account of her twenty-one-day jury sequestration in the 1976 murder trial of a young Black revolutionary charged with the murders of two white Philadelphia prison wardens. More than forty years after Menaker voted to convict Frederick Burton of murder, she tells a devastating story of uncovering how her naiveté and white privilege may have led her to convict a man whose shoes she never could have walked in. Compiled from historical research and Menaker’s recollections of growing up and coming of age in a predominantly white world, this memoir spells out the fundamental flaws in our criminal justice system and proclaims one juror’s moral imperative to help set things right—nearly a half-century later. carolmenaker.com