Susan Croce Kelly

Susan Croce Kelly has been a newspaper reporter Missouri, an award-winning columnist in Texas, public relations executive in St. Louis, Chicago, Belgium, and England, founded Ozarks Magazine, and was president of her own corporate writing business. During those years she also managed to help put up the tent for a one-elephant circus, spend the night on a Gulf of Mexico Oil Platform, walked the Camino Santiago, and learned to pilot an airplane. Today she is managing editor of OzarksWatch Magazine, and spends time talking about the world of twentieth century newspaper journalism. 

Her first published work, a poem, appeared in the “Over the Ozarks” column Springfield Daily News when she was 10 years old. She sold her first short story to Diners Club Magazine when she was 14, and bought a collie puppy with the payment. Since then, she has written hundreds of articles for the popular press across the country about everything from Route 66 to how-to-introduce-pets-into-Blended-Families, and penned an award-winning newspaper column on aging Baby Boomers called “Booming Right Along.”

She is the recipient of the John T. Woodruff award for her support of the Mother Road, of Missouri’s Walter Williams Major Work Award, a Best Book Award from the Oklahoma Writers Federation, and is an inductee into the Missouri Writers Hall of Fame. She lives in Springfield, Missouri, with her husband Joel Kirkpatrick. They have three children and two perfect grandchildren.