Jo Scott-Coe

2025 San Antonio Conservation Society Publication AwardUnheard 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 described, 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 shootings. 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 shows how Kathy's letters go 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 to our age of atrocities.

Literary Nonfiction. On August 1, 1966, after murdering his wife and mother at home, Charles Whitman climbed the clock tower at UT Austin and ordained himself high priest of the first televised mass shooting and "domestic terror" spectacle in American history. Without realizing it, Whitman replicated a twisted version of the Catholic rituals he had learned as an altar boy, in a culture where he saw how priests and fathers could get away with almost anything. This gruesome liturgy has continued to repeat on TV and in headlines for more than half a century. In MASS: A SNIPER, A FATHER, AND A PRIEST Jo Scott-Coe uncovers a buried story to probe the hidden wounds of paternal-pastoral failure and to interrogate our collective American conscience. Contains extensive supplementary materials, including author's notes and sources.

Literary Nonfiction. Education Studies. Memoir. Why would a high school teacher who loves teaching leave school--after half a career in the classroom? TEACHER AT POINT BLANK answers this question at a time when concerns about school performance, safety, and teacher attrition are at an all-time and often anxious high. Meditating on subtle and overt forms of violence in secondary public education from an up-close and pink collar point of view, Jo Scott-Coe defies clich s and cultural fantasies about teachers. She examines her own workplace as a microcosm of the national compulsory K--12 system, where teachers--now nearly 80 percent women--find themselves idealized and disparaged, expected to embody the dedication of parents, the coldness of data managers, and the obedience of Stepford spouses. In this groundbreaking memoir in essays, Scott-Coe recounts her own journey to recover a sane and independent voice. TEACHER AT POINT BLANK fuses her perspectives as teacher and former student, adult and child, educator and writer.