A Life on Fire: Oklahoma’s Kate Barnard author talk with Connie Cronley

On Saturday, February 8, at 1:30 p.m., the Oklahoma Territorial Museum will host an author talk with Connie Cronley. The event is free to the public. Copies of her book A Life on Fire: Oklahoma’s Kate Barnard (2021) will be available for purchase in the museum’s store at the event.

About the Author

Cronley is the author of A Life on Fire: Oklahoma’s Kate Barnard, which the Oklahoma Historical Society named the best history book of 2021. Born in Nowata and currently residing in Tulsa, Cronley is an Oklahoma Native and enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation. She has won a lifetime achievement award from the Tulsa chapter of American Women of Communications and the Arts and Humanities Pinnacle Award from the Mayor’s Commission on the Status of Women and the YWCA.

A Life on Fire

Cronley’s award-winning book, A Life on Fire: Oklahoma’s Kate Barnard, is the biography of Barnard, a popular social reformer who dedicated herself to political and social reform on behalf of orphans, the mentally ill, the incarcerated, and the poor. She conducted inspections and reported egregious misconduct involving American Indian properties in Osage County—years before the FBI arrived to investigate the deaths of headright owners, as recounted in David Grann’s book, Killers of the Flower Moon.

“I believe Kate Barnard is the most important woman in Oklahoma history,” Cronley says, “but if that is so, why haven’t more people heard of her?” Answering that question is the mission of this book. In A Life on Fire, Cronley writes the biography of Catherine Ann “Kate” Barnard (1875–1930), a fiery political reformer and a fearless activist on behalf of the weak and helpless. Barnard was the first woman elected to state office in Oklahoma as commissioner of charities and corrections in 1907—almost fifteen years before women won the right to vote in the United States.