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.

When seventeen-year-old, white Berneen O'Brien moves to Tulsa and takes a job at a segregated elementary school, she becomes increasingly involved in the lives of her black colleagues and shares their experiences during the deadly race riot that destroys Greenwood in 1921.

Dramatically compelling and historically informed, the stories in acclaimed author Pat Carr's latest collection, The Death of a Confederate Colonel, take us into the lives of those left behind during the Civil War. These stories, all with Arkansas settings, are filled with the trauma of the killing, the dying, and the horrendous wounds of the war. They tell of a Confederate woman's care of and growing affection for a wounded Union soldier, a plantation mistress' singular love for a sick slave child, and an eight-year-old girl's fight for survival against frigid cold, injury, starvation, heartbreak, and lawlessness. Here are women showing what they're made of as they hold down the home front with heroism and loyalty, or, sometimes, with weakness and duplicity. Will a young woman remain loyal to her betrothed when he returns from the war maimed? How long can a caring nurse hold her finger on a severed artery and keep a soldier alive? And how does anyone comprehend the legacy of slavery and the brutality of war? The Death of a Confederate Colonel triumphs in its portrayal of desperate circumstances coated in the patina of the Civil War era, the complexity of ordinary people confronting situations that change them forever.