SUSAN SHERRELL

Susan Sherrell received her BA in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, her RN at Merritt College, and her MBA at San Francisco State University. She lived and worked in Bangkok , upcountry Thailand, and a Cambodian refugee camp in the 70s and 80s as a English teacher, pediatric nurse and nutritionist. In the 70s she also volunteered at the Black Panther's Party's George Jackson Clinic. She later worked as a nurse at Santa Rita Prison and Oakland County Jail.These experiences form the background of GRACE, a murder mystery involving the conflicts between the Black Panther Party and the Oakland police in the early 70's. The connections between the Vietnam war and the internal war against the Left, the antiwar movement, and black liberation groups cast a long shadow over the investigation into Grace's murder. Susan said " At that time I thought it unusual that I was related to people whose views were so radically different from my own. The protagonist of Grace, Leah, a UC journalism student, has an ambivalent relationship with her cousin Joey, a homicide detective in the Oakland Police Department. He speaks frankly about his hatred of the Black Panthers, and his justifications for the actions the police take against them. Many people experienced similar ambiguous relationships - during the Vietnam War and during more recent periods of fear and domestic upheaval. This may be why readers have expressed such interest in Leah , her police cousin Joey, and the prime suspect, the Black Panther James Ferguson."