Pat DeGraw Winter Born on the Mississippi, grew up in Arkansas, educated in California, lived in several States in between, Pat Winter follows The Madoc Saga with JAGUAR KING...Book One in the Mississippi Saga that will eventually recount the human story of the Great River Road from prehistory through 1865. As a child, Pat told stories before she could read. TV was a fuzzy black-&-white snowstorm from Memphis; she created a scrolled "TV news" show with photos, two pencils and a shoebox. She staged clothes-line plays silhouetted behind sheets, and gave 6th grade reports about antique light bulbs and other old things from Big Mama's Victorian rooming house. Experience as a mother of two with a boy she married young & divorced early, inspired her first short story about children raised INSIDE MOTHER, a surrogate mama-ship-habitat. Published in the 1970 science fiction anthology Infinity One by Lancer Books with the married byline DeGraw, she was by then a single mother studying under a USC journalism scholarship. Believing Mark Twain's adage that "news is history in its first and most vivid form, of which history is only the pale, tranquil reflection," Pat took a B.A. in print journalism, and later a Masters in documentary TV at UCLA. Analog Magazine's April 1973 featured a second s.f. tale, POLIMANDER'S MAN-THING about a telepathic bat-like creature who steals a radio from human astronauts to build a psychic hearing aid for his silent child. She loved work as a reporter for the San Diego Union, and later writer, editor and on air reporter at KFWB All News Radio where she sold the story SOMEONE I TOUCHED for the ABC TV movie. To support writing her first published novel, the thriller-romance DRIVER, she taught at USC and an LA community college. She taught tech writing for a computer consultancy, and broadcast writing at an NYC media college before launching her first historical novel: WOMAN CALLED ARKANSAS was originally published as the Bantam title RIVER OF DESTINY about French Colonial life on the Mississippi that continues its stream through Pat Winter's life, work and dreams.