Pat Carr – författare

For decades, a riot that killed three hundred people and wounded hundreds of others was scarcely heard of. But several new studies have focused attention on Tulsa's Greenwood race riot of 1921. In If We Must Die novelist Pat Carr turns that tragedy into a riveting novel. When Berneen O'Brien's mother dies, the seventeen-year-old moves from Wyorning to Tulsa to live with her stern uncle. Berneen secures a teaching position at Liberty Elementary School. When she meets the principal, Nelson Flowers, she is amazed to find that he is a black man. Slowly, as she meets the other teachers, Berneen realizes that she is teaching in a black school. Her worries about being an outcast soon disappear, as the other teachers make her welcome. Berneen, who is of Black-Irish descent, doesn't realize that the teachers and students all assume she is also black. At school and after hours Berneen finds herself moving in the world of the segregated Greenwood neighborhood. And she finds herself increasingly drawn to Nelson Flowers. Racial tension erupts into violence when a young white girl accuses a black shoeshine boy of raping her in an office-building elevator. Whites burn Greenwood and storm the neighborhood, shooting and beating black men, women, and children. Berneen is trapped in the school with Nelson Flowers and the teachers when the mob approaches. The story of their desperate attempt to escape is realistic and frightening, made more so by its historical accuracy. This novel is both insightful and a real page-turner.

In August 1914, recently orphaned Cooper Harrison arrives in El Paso to live with grandparents she's never met. The minute the fifteen-year-old steps off the train, everything seems wrong. The heat is stifling, her grandfather Luther is cold and appraising and, worse, doesn't even mention the recent loss of both parents. Her grandmother, Angelica, is remote and child-like and wears only black and diamonds. When Cooper asked to come live with her grandparents, she wanted to help in the family antique business and soon shows her aptitude for the field. But, she discovers that Luther not only runs a shady concern but also profits from the Mexican Revolution smuggling arms across the border. Luther leaves for Mexico with a wagonload of bullets hidden in sacks of corn and is kidnapped by Pancho Villa's men. Cooper realizes she's the only one to carry the ransom to Villa's camp. She meets a Hollywood actor and cameraman - in El Paso to film Villa's life - and convinces them to join her in the attempt to rescue her grandfather. The ensuing adventure takes the reader on wild ride deep into the Mexican countryside.

Pat Carr may be the only person in the United States who spent her childhood next door to a Japanese relocation camp in Wyoming in the 1940s, grew up to pass for black in 1950s Texas, started teaching college in the Jim Crow South of the 1960s, and crossed paths with scores of other authors over half a century's journey as a professional writer.But universal truth is found in every writer's singular experience, and Carr's memoir illuminates the path for others who have chosen the writing life. "Everything we do, everywhere we've been, influences us," Carr believes. Pacing her revealing memoir as a series of single-page episodes, she offers distilled glimpses of the people, places, and moments that made a lasting impression and provided the fabric and fuel of her writing. At the same time Carr's pages reveal her attempts to find the authentic centers of her life: relationships with family, friends, lovers, fellow writers; struggles with racial and gender discrimination; and above all her writing identity.