Patricia Kennealy Morrison Books in Order

If you want the main Keltiad saga: The Copper Crown → The Throne of Scone → The Silver Branch
If you want the earliest history of Keltia: The Deer's Cry → The Copper Crown
If you want Arthurian space fantasy: The Hawk's Gray Feather → The Oak Above the Kings → The Hedge of Mist
If you want her nonfiction first: Strange Days → Light Our Fire: My Wedding to Jim Morrison → Rock Chick

Patricia Kennealy Morrison was born Patricia Kennely on March 4, 1946, in Brooklyn, and grew up on Long Island, in North Babylon. She came from a strict Irish Catholic family, and that Irish background stayed with her for the rest of her life, especially in her interest in Celtic myth, ritual, and history. She studied first at St. Bonaventure, then transferred to Harpur College, now Binghamton University, where she graduated with a degree in English in 1967.

Then rock journalism found her.

After college she moved to Manhattan, worked at Macmillan, and quickly made her way into music writing. At Jazz & Pop she rose to editor-in-chief from 1968 to 1971, becoming one of the first women working as a national rock critic. That mattered. Rock writing was still being invented, and she was part of the small first wave treating popular music as something worth arguing about seriously. Later she worked in advertising and copywriting for RCA and CBS Records, which gave her a close look at the music business from the inside as well.

A January 1969 interview with Jim Morrison changed the course of her public life. The two began a relationship, and in June 1970 they took part in a Celtic handfasting ceremony that she regarded as a marriage. After Morrison died in July 1971, that relationship remained tied to her name in the public mind, sometimes so tightly that it overshadowed everything else she did. She later wrote about those years in Strange Days and, much later, in Light Our Fire: My Wedding to Jim Morrison.

She kept writing.

In the early 1980s she turned seriously to fiction and started the long project that fantasy readers know best, the Keltiad. She once described it as a way to bring together two lifelong interests, Celtic mythology and space science, and that tells you a lot about the books. The Copper Crown, The Throne of Scone, The Silver Branch, and The Hawk's Gray Feather mix queens, druids, prophecy, politics, star travel, and Arthurian legend in one big, fearless blend. Readers who love them usually love the same things: the sheer commitment to the world, the mythic scale, and the sense that personal choices can shake whole kingdoms.

She did not stay in one lane for long. Blackmantle and The Deer's Cry widened the history of Keltia, while Tales of Spiral Castle returned to that setting in shorter form. Rock Chick later gathered her early music writing from the Jazz & Pop years, which lets readers meet the young critic before the fantasy novelist took over. She also wrote a rock and roll mystery series under the shorter name Patricia Morrison, and later set up her own imprint, Lizard Queen Press, to keep publishing her work on her own terms.

What runs through all of it is a very strong point of view. She could be sharp, funny, stubborn, romantic, and unapologetically intense, sometimes all at once. Even people who do not connect with every part of her work tend to remember her. She spent most of her adult life in New York, and she died in Manhattan on July 21, 2021, at age 75. By then she had left behind rock criticism, memoir, fantasy, mysteries, and a body of work that always sounded like itself.