Jean Heller has more than 35 years of experience as a writer and editor with The Associated Press and newspapers as diverse as New York's Newsday, the Cox Newspapers and the St. Petersburg Times. She is an eight-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and was twice a finalist. She is responsible for breaking such renowned stories as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which poor black farmers in Alabama were used as guinea pigs for 40 years in a U.S. Public Health Service study of the disease, and the story of how the administration of President George H.W. Bush lied about the greater Iraqi threat after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 in order to justify U.S. entry into the first Persian Gulf War.
Jean is also a twice-published novelist.