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Unheard Witness
From University of Texas Press
Unheard Witness foregrounds a young woman’s experience of domestic abuse, resistance, and survival before the mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966.
In 1966, Kathy Leissner Whitman was a twenty-three-year-old teacher dreaming of a better future. She was an avid writer of letters, composing hundreds in the years before she was stabbed to death by her husband, Charles Whitman, who went on to commit a mass shooting from the tower at the University of Texas at Austin. Kathy’s writing provides a rare glimpse of how one woman expressed, and sought to change, her short life with a coercive, controlling, and violent partner.
Unheard Witness provides a portrait of Kathy’s life, doing so at a time when Americans are slowly grasping the link between domestic abuse and mass shooting. Public violence often follows violence in the home, yet such private crimes continue to be treated separately and even erased in the public imagination. Jo Scott-Coe studies Kathy’s letters against the grain of the official history, which ignored Kathy’s perspective. With its nuanced understanding of abuse and survival, Unheard Witness is an intimate, real-time account of trust and vulnerability—in its own way, a prologue for our age of atrocity.
Rachel Monroe says:
“In Unheard Witness…
Jo Scott-Coe takes a story you might think you know and turns it on its head. The life of Kathy Leissner Whitman, told with intimacy, empathy, and care, reveals how private cruelty and public violence are deeply entwined. Too often, stories about mass shooters inadvertently glorify the perpetrators while the victims remain an afterthought. This perceptive, beautifully written book shows how much there is to learn when we do the opposite.”
Award-winning Author
Jo Scott-Coe
Jo Scott-Coe’s latest book is Unheard Witness: The Life and Death of Kathy Leissner Whitman (University of Texas Press). Her previous two nonfiction books are Teacher at Point Blank (Aunt Lute) and MASS: A Sniper, a Father, and a Priest (Pelekinesis), a first-time exploration of the relationship between the 1966 UT Austin sniper and his priest mentor, Rev. Joseph “Gil” Leduc.
Jo’s essays on intersections of public-private violence have been published widely for general as well as academic audiences. Her work has appeared in venues including Salon, The Los Angeles Times, American Studies Journal, Tahoma Literary Review, Talking Writing, Catapult, Pacific Coast Philology, The Press-Enterprise, Superstition Review, and many others. Her nonfiction has received three Notable listings in Best American Essays and two Pushcart Special Mentions. In 2020, MASS was awarded the silver medal for biography from eLit Awards.
Jo is a professor of English at Riverside City College, where she was selected as 57th Distinguished Faculty Lecturer in part for her study of archival materials. She also facilitates community writing workshops for the Inlandia Institute in Southern California. When she is not writing or teaching, she enjoys reading, experimenting with new recipes, and traveling.
Other Books
Teacher at Point Blank
“…at once disturbing and emancipating”
–Susan Ohanian, author of Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools?
“…unyielding to sentimentality and aspires always towards honesty about our lives as adults and children. One is, here, in the presence of a writer who convinces us that teaching young lives is a constant and, sometimes, terrible journey of adult self-discovery.”
–Richard Rodriguez, author of Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography
Mass
“…powerfully indicts domestic violence, the church, and the military as common training grounds for the kind of mass violence that is now emerging as a regular ritual of our American (masculine) exceptionalism.”
–David Adams, Ed.D, author of Why Do They Kill? Men Who Murder Their Intimate Partners
“…extrapolates the essential elements that help us understand current tragic events with the insight of an investigative reporter and the skill of a novelist.”
–Richard Sipe, author of Sex, Priests, and Power: The Anatomy of a Crisis
“…a relevant, clear-eyed look at what has become all too common: the shooting tragedy that defies logic until a work like Scott-Coe’s shows we can understand if we try.”
–Nancy Rommelmann, author of To the Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder
Unheard Witness
Unheard Witness foregrounds a young woman’s experience of domestic abuse, resistance, and survival before the mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966.
Jo Scott-Coe is a professor of English at Riverside City College. She is the author of three nonfiction books: Teacher at Point Blank, MASS: A Sniper, a Father, and a Priest, and most recently, Unheard Witness.
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