Books

 W.K. Stratton tells the fascinating history of the making of the movie and documents for the first time the extraordinary contribution of Mexican and Mexican-American actors and crew members to the movie’s success.

In Chasing the Rodeo W. K. Stratton follows this quest for one season of the pro rodeo and bull-riding tours. He explores the history of the chutes -- from rodeo's disputed origins (Prescott, Arizona, or Pecos, Texas?) to its current skyrocketing popularity.

W.K. Stratton continues his exploration of alter ego alleyways in his second book of poetry, Ranchero Ford/Dying in Red Dirt Country. Written in both verse and prose-poem form, the pieces in the book form a poetic concept album dealing much with time and place and family, both real and imagined.

Kip Stratton's Betrayal Creek is contemporary confessional poetry at its finest. It lays bare the inward landscape of an "ordinary man / with spurs and a saddle-scarred soul" through a lover's betrayal, into the depths of depression, and finally out into the glorious Texan sunlight beckoning on the other side of a window.

This book is a single long poem that can be read as a series of related lyrical poems dealing with elements of the author's life and his responses to the death of his mother. The writer says in the preface, "the mother appearing in these lines is both my mother but also a metaphor."

Floyd Patterson was boxing’s invisible champion, but in this deeply researched and beautifully written biography he comes vividly to life and is finally given his due — as one of the most artful boxers of his time and as one of our great sportsmen, a man who shaped the world in and out of the ring.

In this compelling biography, acclaimed author W. K. "Kip" Stratton collaborates with Zamarron to tell the story of her unlikely rise to the pinnacle of women's boxing. With searing honesty, Zamarron describes how the chaotic breakup of her childhood family caused her to develop "demons" that drove her to aggressive behavior in school, an addiction to self-destructive habits, including cutting, and eventually to a corrupt for-profit mental hospital in which she spent eighteen months tied to a bed.

W. K. Stratton takes you through this rivalry and its history, covering the years when the game was postponed because the fans were just too violent, the branding of UT’s beloved steer, Bevo, by a renegade Aggie, the kidnapping of A&M’s beloved Reveille by boisterous UT students, the theft of UT’s cannon, Old Smokey, and its unceremonious dumping into the murky waters of Austin’s Town Lake, and the fistfights that broke out when celebrating UT fans rushed A&M’s nearly sacred Kyle Field after Texas won the last-ever Southwest Conference title on the Aggies’ home turf.

W.K. Stratton's 'Colo--State--Pen: 18456, A Dark Miscellany' is volume three in the Dreaming Sam Peckinpah Quintet (earlier entries are 'Dreaming Sam Peckinpah' and 'Ranchero Ford/Dying in Red Dirt Country'). The poems and prose deal with pain, sorrow, regret, disillusion, history, family breakdown, and Western landscapes.