About Speaker O.K. Carter

August 2023

O.K. Carter (the “O.K is short for Owen Kelton) is a former editor and publisher of the (now defunct) Grand Prairie Urbanite, as well as the Arlington Citizen Journal, and he was also Arlington publisher and columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He was the founding editor of Arlington Today Magazine. As a member of the Star-Telegram Editorial Board he conducted more than a thousand political endorsement interviews. Carter semi-retired from the Star-Telegram in 2008 after more than 10,000 columns and editorials, along with more than a hundred assorted journalism awards for everything from editorials and feature writing to columns. He also served on the Tarrant County College regents board for seven years (2010 to 2017). As someone who both teaches and does, he taught everything from journalism basics to feature writing at UT-Arlington, working as an adjunct or visiting professor for more than three decades. Add that to more than a thousand magazine articles (topics range from serial killers and lemur DNA to mini robots), script writing more than 500 TV news shows, and penning six fiction novels (all available on Amazon). He’s working on his seventh novel right now, along with writing an occasional update to what has become the definitive book of Arlington’s colorful history, Caddos, Cotton and Cowboys: Essays on Arlington. He’s also produced a number of video minidocumentaries on Arlington history, all of which you can check out on his YouTube channel (one of those videos is about the Bankhead Highway). He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of North Texas, though he’s been a serial college student, that list including TCU, the University of Maryland and UT-Arlington, plus a couple of community colleges. In his distant history, he was also a Marines staff sergeant (1965-69). Carter’s journalism career led to an interest and then expertise in community history, with a particular focus on suburban development. He’s won both the William Jary Award as author of the best local history preservation book of that year and the Texas Sierra Club’s top award for environmental reporting. Carter lives in Arlington, Texas, with his wife Donna Darovich—a talented and award-winning writer herself—and four semi-trained dogs.