W. K. Stratton
W.K. Stratton (William Kip Stratton) is an American writer, known for his historical non-fiction publications. Stratton lives in suburban Austin, Texas. (Note: This is not the actor W. K. Stratton from the television show Baa Baa Black Sheep.)
Early life and career
A native of Guthrie, Oklahoma, he graduated from high school there and attended the nearby University of Central Oklahoma (at the time known as Central State University), where he took at B.A. in English and an M.A. in English, with an emphasis on Creative Studies; he wrote a novel for his thesis.
To support himself through college, he worked as a newspaper reporter and editor on his hometown daily. He spent ten years as a newspaper journalist, including a stint on the Tulsa World.
He worked in politics as well, serving as Reading Clerk and as a press aide for the Oklahoma State Senate and was a voter education consultant for the Oklahoma State Election Board, which was affiliated with the State Senate. He also managed two political campaigns.
Career as writer
In the late 1980s, he relocated to Central Texas. After successfully selling freelance articles to Sports Illustrated, Outside and other magazines, including a stint as a contributing editor for Oklahoma Today, he began a 15-year freelance affiliation with the Dallas Morning News, contributing criticism and occasionally columns and feature stories. He later was published in GQ Magazine.
To support his writing career, he worked at a variety of day-jobs, including as a college English instructor, trade magazine editor, and technical writer. Eventually he became a successful manager at an international high tech company, National Instruments, focusing on technical documentation and product localization.
In 2002, Crown Publishing Group, an imprint of Random House, published his first book, Backyard Brawl, which explored the University of Texas-Texas A&M University football rivalry while examining cultural evolution in modern Texas. Both historical and anecdotal, the book captures both the Texan love of football, and the context from which this love arises.
Two years later, Harcourt published his memoir, Chasing the Rodeo, a multifaceted history of rodeo that also traces the life and origins of his runaway birth father, who was a rodeo cowboy in the 1950s and 60s.
Also in 2004, the University of Texas Press published Splendor in the Short Grass: A Grover Lewis Reader, the first comprehensive collection of the work of Texas cult writer Grover Lewis. Stratton co-edited that book with his close friend Jan Reid, a novelist, nonfiction author, and longtime contributor to Texas Monthly and other magazines.
In his mid-40s, Stratton began training earnestly as a white-collar boxer at R. Lord's Gym in Austin, and this would influence his future writing projects. In 2006, he received contracts for his next two books. The first, published by the University of Texas Press, was a collaboration with pioneering female boxer Anissa Zamarron dealing with her successful recovery from psychological problems and her subsequent winning of two world boxing titles. The book's title is Boxing Shadows. The second project was a study of two-time world heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson, titled Floyd Patterson: The Fighting Life of Boxing's Invisible Champion and shortlisted for the 2013 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing.[1] It was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Bibliography
| Title[2] | Published | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| Ranchero Ford/Dying in Red Dirt Country: Poetry | July 2015 | Lamar University Press |
| Floyd Patterson: The Fighting Life of Boxing's Invisible Champion | July 2012 | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Dreaming Sam Peckinpah: Poetry | September 2011 | Ink Brush Press |
| Boxing Shadows: The story of the unlikely rise of Anissa Zamarron to the pinnacle of women's boxing | October 2009 | University of Texas Press |
| Chasing the Rodeo: On Wild Rides and Big Dreams, Broken Hearts and Broken Bones, and One Man's Search for the West | May 2005 | Harcourt |
| Splendor in the Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader | April 2005 | University of Texas Press |
| Backyard Brawl: Inside the Blood Feud Between Texas and Texas A&M | September 2002 | Crown |
References
- ↑ http://www.pen.org/content/penespn-award-literary-sports-writing-5000
- ↑ Bibliography on W.K. Stratton's website
External links
- W.K. Stratton's website
- Stratton talks with Texas Public Radio's Ernie Villarreal. November 25, 2005 Interview of Author
- Publisher’s Weekly Discusses one of his books.
- mentioned in Austin Chronicle
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