A newspaper journalist right out of the gate, Patricia turned to writing historical mystery novels during the pandemic and hasn’t looked back. Her first fiction is the award-winning Annalee Spain Mystery series whose debut, All That Is Secret, won a Christy Award for First Novel and was picked by NBA All-Star Stephen Curry as a Literati Book Club selection. The series’ second installment, Double the Lies, won the Christianity Today Book Award for Fiction. Third in the series, Truth Be Told, is set to release in June 2024.
Patricia cut her writing teeth in high-pressure newsrooms. A winner of multiple awards for feature writing, she worked a dozen years at Denver newspapers—including The Denver Post, where she was a Sunday Contemporary Magazine editor, and Scripps Howard’s Rocky Mountain News, where she was a feature writer.
Mid-career she joined the journalism faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder where she taught print journalism for 15 years to bright, hard-working graduate and undergraduate students, getting promoted to professor emerita in 2006.
She now writes full-time authoring novels and books at the daring intersection of faith and race. Her personal essays have been published in the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, USA Today, USA Weekend, Guideposts, In Touch Magazine, Christianity Today, the Washington Post, and for National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition. A devotional writer, she’s also a regular contributor at Our Daily Bread Ministries.
Patricia’s nonfiction books include two notable memoirs, My First White Friend, a winner of the Christopher Award and a Books for a Better Life Award, and I Told the Mountain to Move: Learning to Pray So Things Change, a Book of the Year finalist in Christianity Today’s 2006 Book Awards. Patricia was inducted into the Colorado Authors’ Hall of Fame in 2021.
A member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc., PEN America, the Authors Guild, and INK: A Creative Collective, Patricia was also accepted into Mystery Writers of America, Crime Writers of Color, Sisters in Crime, Sisters in Crime-Colorado, Rocky Mountain Mystery Writers of America, and Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. A recent member of the board of trustees at Denver Seminary, Patricia enjoys speaking at church, library, book club and community groups, serving also at writing workshops and conferences nationwide.
