Bio
The Author
Anneliese M. Bruner is the great granddaughter of Tulsa survivor, entrepreneur, author, and Langston University lecturer Mary E. Jones Parrish, and is an essayist, editor, and screenwriter who has worked in the business, media, and nonprofit sectors. She attended Bryn Mawr College. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, USAToday, CNN.com, Honey Magazine, Savoy Magazine, Yes! Magazine, Business Insider, and more. She was born and raised in San Francisco and has lived in Washington, DC, for more than thirty-five years.
For the centennial of the most infamous of the pogroms that were perpetrated on African American communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Tulsa Race Massacre, Anneliese authored the new afterword for the book Mary Parrish originally published in 1923 about the catastrophe. Newly titled The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, the book serves as the primary single source on which all subsequent scholarship on the subject is based. She has spoken to university, corporate, and civic audiences about the importance of teaching accurate and inclusive American history, and has also presented the case of Tulsa to the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent. This year, Anneliese completed a screenplay that describes the physical and metaphysical journey of the "little red book" that Mary Parrish wrote, from 1921 Tulsa to 2021 Washington, DC.
Anneliese is currently marketing the screenplay that was inspired by her remarkable ancestor's contribution to history and is launching the Mary Jones Parrish Reading Room for History Literacy (TBA).