It’s fairly impossible to grow up or even live in Oklahoma for a short time and not know S.E. Hinton, famous Tulsa author of young adult novels The Outsiders, Tex, and many more. Many readers are familiar with best-selling mystery writer William Bernhardt, also from Tulsa. However, there are four other excellent writers in and from Green Country that everyone ought to know.
Anna Myers
Myers, a writer born in Texas but who moved to Oklahoma when she was only a few months old, has lived in Tulsa all of her life. She is one of the most-awarded Oklahoma writers of young adult and children’s fiction. Her book Tulsa Burning, about the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, won seven different state and national book awards on its own.
Several of her books have been on the Sequoyah Awards book list, a group of exceptional books chosen each year by Oklahoma students. Myers has 18 books to her credit, and her latest one Time of the Witches (Walker Books, 2009) is an excellent new young adult novel using the setting of the Salem Witch Trials for the suspenseful story. On her website, you can view a video about this book.
Ally Carter
Another very popular writer of young adult fiction, Ally Carter grew up in Locust Grove. “Ally Carter” is her pen name for the best-selling novels she writes in the Gallagher Girls series, books about girls in a prestigious spy school. The first book in this series I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You is in the works as a feature-length movie.
Carter is the author of eight books, with the latest being The Heist, the first in a new series about a family of thieves that focuses on the young girl Kat’s need to save her father from the mafia. According to her website, Carter is currently on tour promoting Only the Good Spy Young, the fourth Gallagher Girls book. However, the closest she is coming to Oklahoma is Wichita, Kansas, on August 2, at Watermark Books.
Charles Sasser
And now, as Monty Python said, for something completely different . . . a prolific writer of war, adventure, and crime novels, Charles Sasser lives in Chouteau. Retired from the Navy and the Green Berets, Sasser has written a series of Detachment Delta books, along with true crime and mysteries. In 1994, he published In Cold Blood: Oklahoma's Most Notorious Murders. His most recent book, God in the Foxhole, is a collection of true accounts of soldiers who relied on faith to survive in combat.
Sasser, who has written more than 50 books has a spectacular past. His biography illuminates this thinking man’s Rambo: “Sasser has solo-canoed the Yukon; sailed the Caribbean; motorbiked across the continent; ridden camels in the Egyptian desert; floated the Amazon River; dived for pirate treasure; ridden horses across Alaska; motorcycled Europe; climbed Mt. Rainier; run with the bulls in Spain; chased wild mustangs; and guided missionaries into the Algerian outback.”
Joy Harjo
And again . . . for something completely different. Harjo, an internationally-known poet originally from Tulsa, is one of the best voices in contemporary American poetry. She is a member of the Creek nation who writes beautifully from a Native American perspective on human desires and struggles. Her books of poetry have won many awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas.
For whatever reason, many people do not read poetry; however, Harjo’s work will reward the non-poetry-reading person. In addition, Harjo has written children’s and young adult books, the latest being For a Girl Becoming, which Harjo wrote, according to her website, “as a gift for her first grandchild as she moved from childhood to womanhood.” But, in addition to being an accomplished writer, Harjo is also a noted musician, whose latest CD is called Winding Through the Milky Way.
The next time you’re looking for a good book to read, don’t forget the excellent and interesting writers that live, perhaps, right in your back yard.
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