According to the San Antonio Report published on July 11, 2025:
“Paulette Jiles, an award-winning and best-selling novelist and poet who spent the last 30-plus years living and writing in San Antonio and in the Texas Hill Country, died on July 8. She was 82.
Jiles said in her blog that she had been recently diagnosed with a form of non-alcoholic cirrhosis.
A Missouri native, Jiles lived in Canada for several years mainly as a poet and a reporter before returning to the United States where she married and moved to San Antonio and then the Hill Country to become a novelist. She sold more than 800,000 books across North America.”
The paper, in its obituary also stated:
“jiles produced her first novel, 2002’s Enemy Women, a Civil War-era piece that tells the story of a young woman who finds love and hope amid the carnage and betrayal that she and her family experience during the conflict.
Enemy Women won Jiles another Canadian literary award — the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
The success of Enemy Women elevated Jiles’ writing career.”
Enemy Women just happened to be the novel that introduced me to Jiles’ writing, the novel was set in Southeast Missouri, an area in which I was born, raised and still reside today.
While Enemy Women brought great success, it also generated a fair amount of controversy as a Civil War massacre that took place on Christmas Day, 1863 was the focal point of it.
It was this controversy, and the personal attacks against Jiles that inspired me to write “Blood in the Ozarks”. I believed the massacre happened, I set out to prove it happened and I did just that.
During my writing of “Blood in the Ozarks” I began to correspond with Mrs. Jiles and we became “pen pals” of sorts. She began a tradition of sending me a signed copy of her latest novel whenever she finished on (along with a heartfelt note) which I will always treasure.
I communicated extensively when she was writing “Chenneville: A Novel of Murder, Loss, and Vengeance“ and before the book was released, she said she was going to send me an autographed, advanced copy (as was her tradition).
It never came, I got busy and didn’t ask her what happened. Partly because of my personal life and partly because I didn’t want to bother her. For whatever reason the thought crossed my mind today that maybe there was a reason I didn’t hear back from her. Curiosity got the best of me, I typed her name into a search engine, and my worst fears were confirmed. Paulette Jiles had left us.
I want to thank her for shining a spotlight on a part of the country in which the Civil War is rarely mentioned in mainstream circles. Paulette changed that along with inspiring me to write my first book.
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