Judy Alter is a lifelong fan of mysteries and, now retired from a career with an academic press, she turned her attention to writing mysteries. Now there are six in the Kelly O’Connell Mystery Series, two in the Blue
Plate Mystery Series and a
stand-alone
The Perfect Coed. The most recent Kelly O’Connell title,
Desperate for Death, released in May 2015.
She’s been a writer since she was ten or twelve and distinctly remembers submitting a story to Seventeen. But her first book,
After Pa Was Shot, a young-adult novel, was published in 1978. Since then she’s written fiction and nonfiction for young adults, adults, and even second graders. Give her a topic and she’ll write about it, but her main focus for years was women of the American West, with novels about Jessie Benton Frémont, Elizabeth Bacon
(Mrs. George Armstrong) Custer, Lucille Mulhall, the first woman roper, and Etta Place and the Sundance Kid.
She has had awards from the National
Cowboy Museum and Hall of Fame, the Texas Institute of Letters, and Western Writers of America, Inc., including their Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement, and she was inducted into the Hall of Fame in June 2015. She belongs to Sisters in Crime, the Guppies subgroup of Sisters in Crime, and the Texas Institute of Letters. The Fort Worth Public Library elected her to their Texas Literary Hall of Fame.
Judy is also passionate about cooking. She loves to experiment on guests, entertain, and explore new tastes, new techniques. Yet some of her old stand-by dishes are too savory to give up. Hence the cooking pages on her website. You’ll find the food-related books she’s written, recipes she’s tried, and contributions from others. Cooking is a community activity! Her book on chili, called
Texas is Chili Country, is due from Texas Tech Press in November 2015.
There’s a third major element to her life: she is the proud mother of four and grandmother of seven. All of them, thank goodness, live in Texas (at least for now), but only one in Fort Worth—one daughter, one son-in-law, one grandchild.
When there are no kids or grandkids
visiting, she is content in a lovely 1922 red brick bungalow with a great party porch, a garden of wildflowers, a border collie/poodle cross, and a bevy of good friends. You can keep up with her at her blog,
Judy’s Stew (
www.judys-stew.blogspot.com).
