CONTACT the AUTHOR carlacc@clinttheblackcat.com

Clint the Black Cat's™ author (and owner) is Carla Christina Contreras, a California native, who has enjoyed a professional career as an actress, singer, writer, and graphic artist. She began her screen acting career on the legendary TV show, The Waltons, and has appeared in numerous commercials and features. An NBC-TV movie-of-the-week, Following Her Heart, shot in Nashville, starring Ann-Margret, gave Carla one of her biggest co-starring film roles to date.

Before writing Clint the Black Cat™, Carla had always lent her skills and talent to community activities from California to Tennessee. After moving to Nashville from Hollywood in 1992, Carla was bitten by the volunteer spirit in Tennessee. One of her pet projects is with the Nashville Metro School District Pencil Pal Foundation, where she discovered the absence of funding for the arts.

"I was shocked to find out that the art education program was funded on a shoestring - - and a broken one at that," she recalls.

Carla volunteers her talent at Pennington Elementary School. She decided that the best way to involve the Kindergarten thru 4th grade students she was working with, was to have them help her with her book idea based on her own true life pet, Clint the Black Cat™. They would contribute drawings for her book, and the school would receive proceeds from the sale of the book to go toward funding the creative arts program at Pennington. "This was one of those ideas that woke me up in the middle of the night," says Carla. "I pitched the idea to Mrs. Evans, the principal, and Mrs. Johnson, the art teacher who was being funded by the PTA's shoestring budget." Mrs. Evans & Mrs. Johnson decided to include Clint the Black Cat™ in their art class curriculum.

Carla's own cat, Clint (a black cat), became the locomotive for the entire book series project. "So for the next book, I'm planning to go to another school where they need money for the arts," she says.

Carla received support from every newspaper, business journal, talk-radio show, and TV station in Nashville for her efforts to help the Metro arts program through Clint the Black Cat™. "It was amazing, everybody wanted to cover our story, they said it was the kind of human interest story that doesn't come along every day."

Carla's marketing skills are evident in everything she has done in her career. She is a natural on camera, radio, and in print. Her sense of humor, like the message found in Clint the Black Cat™, is entirely accessible.

Carla's love of writing includes songs, an upcoming greeting card line, as well as cowboy poetry. "I've been working with a couple of cowboy poets, and I really love reading my stuff at local poetry slams - especially my character Ruby, who runs a saloon in a honky-tonk mining town in the Old West." Carla adds, "the greeting card line is called "The Truth & Honesty Collection™- When you have nothing nice to say, but you say it anyway," but that's for later...."

A thorough professional, Carla has earned many awards and certificates for her work as a graphic designer, photographer, and artist. She currently resides in Ashland City Tennessee where she continues her pursuits of National notoriety for Clint the Black Cat™, the next National Spokesperson Empowering Children to be CREATIVE! ! !