🏆 August 2025 Finalist for Book Adaptation Needed from Page Turner Awards
🏆 June 2025 Finalist True Crime from National Indie Excellence Awards
🏆 May 2025 1st Place True Crime from Next Generation Indie Book Awards
🏆 May 2025 Winner True Crime from Indie Reader Discovery Awards
🏆 May 2025 Silver Medal True Crime from Independent Press Book Awards
🏆 April 2025 1st Place Nellie Bly Journalism from Chanticleer Intl' Book Awards
🏆 Feb 2025 1st Place Debut Author from Feathered Quill Book Awards
FROM THE BACK COVER
After three years in Europe, former journalist Carla Conti just wanted to settle her family into the suburbs of Philadelphia. But her high school friend Scott Powell, a lawyer handling a brutal prison stabbing case, needed a favor. Before she knew it, Carla became part of the defense team and mired in the terrifying world of federal prison gangs, penal abuse, and corruption.
Then, when she agreed to write a tell-all book on the violent machinations behind the court case-with Scott's client as an inside source-the stakes turned deadly. Two different prison gangs issued "hit orders" against the prisoner she and Scott now considered a friend, and the journalist and defense attorney were imperiled by association.
CHAINED BIRDS: A CRIMEMOIR is the story of Carla's 10-year journey to advocate for federal inmate Kevin Sanders and help him re-enter society after prison. But the mission came at a cost as Carla struggled to balance her own, Scott's, and Kevin's safety while writing an exposé on the horrific conditions that led to the shutdown of an experimental prison program in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
Part investigative thriller, part raw memoir, CHAINED BIRDS is a gripping exposé of systemic injustice and a powerful reminder of the resilience it takes to uncover the truth.
Autorentext
Carla Conti is a former journalist and author of the award-winning true crime memoir Chained Birds: A Crimemoir, a prison abuse exposé about justice and survival in federal prison. It took her ten years to write as she balanced the safety of the story participants (including herself) in this tell-all thriller of prison gang hit orders and corrupt officials.
Chained Birds has won multiple 2025 national and international book awards, including 1st Place in True Crime from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, Winner in True Crime from the Indie Reader Discovery Awards, Silver in True Crime from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY), and a 1st Place Nellie Bly Journalism award from the Chanticleer International Book Awards.
Carla's next true crime book is another Pennsylvania thriller called The Jacklighter: Murder, Secrets, and the Hunt for Truth in Small-Town Pennsylvania. It's scheduled for release in 2026.