Team
Patricia Bernstein
A native Texan, Patricia Bernstein was born in El Paso and raised in Dallas. She attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and graduated with a Degree of Distinction in American Studies. She was named to Phi Beta Kappa her junior year. Following her graduation, she taught English at Smith for four years.
Ms. Bernstein founded Bernstein & Associates, Inc., in 1983. She is also a writer and historian who has published numerous articles in newspapers and magazines as varied as Texas Monthly, The Smithsonian and Cosmopolitan. She has published three books. The first, with Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, was Having a Baby: Mothers Tell Their Stories, a collection of first-person accounts of childbirth from the 1890s to the 1990s.
Her second book was The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP, with Texas A & M University Press. The most recent book is Ten Dollars to Hate: The Texas Man Who Fought the Klan, also published with Texas A & M. This is the story of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, and the young Texas district attorney who became the first prosecutor in the country to convict Klansmen for a brutal assault and get them serious prison time.
Ten Dollars to Hate: The Texas Man Who Fought the Klan was named a 2017 finalist for the Scholarly Book Category award of the Texas Institute of Letters. Ten Dollars to Hate was also recently included in the Austin American Statesman’s list of the best books about Texas. Texas Independence Week: 53 of the best books about Texas. “This Houston writer’s main subject is Gov. Dan Moody, who won the first punitive cases as a prosecutor against the KKK in the 1920s, but it reminds us also of the recurring cycles of hate in this country.”
In 2023, Patricia Bernstein will publish her first novel with History Through Fiction, a small, legitimate press. The novel, A Noble Cunning: The Countess and the Tower, is based on the true story of Winifred Maxwell, Countess of Nithsdale, a persecuted Catholic noblewoman who, in 1716, rescued her husband from the Tower of London the night before his scheduled execution with the help of a small group of devoted women friends.
Marie Piazza
Marie Piazza has been employed with Bernstein & Associates, Inc., since 1984 as office manager and account executive working with clients, designers and media. She also coordinates production of client websites, advertisements, brochures, and convention exhibits.
Ms. Piazza was a long-time volunteer and reading tutor in the Houston Independent School District’s Volunteer in Public Schools Program and also volunteered at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
Prior to joining Bernstein & Associates, she was an employee benefits specialist in the human resources department at Medical Center Del Oro Hospital in Houston.