Koerner graduated from
Yale University with a BA degree. In college, he contributed to campus humor magazine
The Yale Record. Koerner's first journalism job out of school was at
U.S. News & World Report as a researcher and fact checker, he eventually became senior editor. Koerner left USN&WR to become a freelance writer in 2000, and was a regular contributor to
The New Republic,
Mother Jones, ''
Harper's Magazine, Legal Affairs, Washington Monthly, and The Christian Science Monitor. He was also a columnist for Gizmodo.com, Slate.com, The New York Times Sunday Business section and the Village Voice (as "Mr. Roboto"). and SciTech Book News''. His first solo authored full length book, ''
Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight from the Greatest Manhunt of World War II'', was published by
Penguin Press in 2008. It is a non-fiction narrative investigating and recounting the story of
Herman Perry, an
African-American World War II soldier stationed in the
China-Burma-India theatre of the war. Perry killed a white officer while helping construct the
Ledo Road. He subsequently retreated into the Indo-Burmese wilderness and joined a tribe of the headhunting
Nagas. The book was favorably reviewed. In 2009,
Spike Lee optioned the film rights and Lee commissioned Koerner to write a draft of the screenplay. In 2011, Koerner published
Piano Demon: The Globetrotting, Gin-Soaked, Too-Short Life of Teddy Weatherford, the Chicago Jazzman Who Conquered Asia, it is about the jazz musician
Teddy Weatherford. Koerner's third book,
The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (2013) is a history of the "golden age" of skyjacking in the United States from the first incident in May 1961 through January 1973, when there were as many as one skyjacking a week or about 159 in total. The book looks at the causes of the epidemic, some of the more famous ones and follows in-depth the story of the longest-distance skyjacking in American history, involving
Willie Roger Holder and
Catherine Marie Kerkow, a young couple who took control of
Western Airlines Flight 701 on June 2, 1972. The book was favorably reviewed including in
The New York Times Book Review,
The New York Times,
The Washington Post,
Los Angeles Times,
The National (Abu Dhabi),
SFGate, and
Bookforum. ==Awards and honors==