Judy Alter

Judy Alter is a past president of Western Writers of America and former secretary of the Texas Institute of Letters. She holds awards from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Hall of Fame, the Texas Institute of Letters, and Western Writers of America (WWA), including the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement, and was inducted into the WWA Hall of Fame in June 2015 and the Fort Worth Public Library Hall of Fame. She was named one of the Outstanding Women of Fort Worth by the mayor in 1988 and was included by the Dallas Morning News in a list of a hundred women who have left their mark on Texas. In 2016 Judy was a finalist for the Will Rogers Medallion Award for her cookbook, Texas Is Chili Country. She is a member of Sisters in Crime and its Guppies subgroup, the Texas Institute of Letters, and Women Writing the West.

Prior to becoming an author, Alter worked for TCU Press, first as editor and, then as director. She retired in 2009 and began writing.

Judy Alter (July 22, 1938) is an American novelist and author of both fiction and nonfiction for adults and young adults. Alter writes primarily about the history and literature of Texas and the American West, especially the experiences of women in the nineteenth century. She has also written sixteen cozy mysteries, primarily set in Texas. Over fifty of her young adult non-fiction books have been published for school libraries by Franklin Watts and Scholastic.