Mary Christian Payne

Mary Christian Payne was highly successful in several management positions in Fortune 500 Companies in New York City, St. Louis, Missouri, Orlando Florida, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work included grant writing, and designing and writing training manuals for executive training programs. She left the corporate world, and became Director of Career Development at the Women' Resource Center at the University of Tulsa where she designed a program that enabled hundreds of adult women to return to college and better their lives. She received the Mayor's Pinnacle Award in 1993 for this achievement. Mary left that position when the Center closed, and then opened her own Career Counseling Center. She retired from corporate work in 2008 to pursue her dreams of becoming an author. Mary Christian Payne became a best selling author at the age of 71 with the help of her publisher, Tom Corson-Knowles. All of her life, she had wanted to write, and had received accolades for her unpublished work. She was encouraged in college, and writing was a significant part of the various jobs she held. In 2013, she read Tom Corson-Knowles book about publishing on Kindle. She wrote to him and he telephoned her. The rest is history. Since that time, she has published twelve books, with several more scheduled to be released soon. Mary lost her husband in 2015 to cancer after 33 years of marriage. The grief process brought a lull to her writing, but she found that putting words on paper helped immensely. She is now in the process of writing her fourth novel since his death. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with her beloved Maltese dog and a newly adopted stray kitten.