[2] During the 1940s, she was briefly married to Andy Fournier, the chief of detectives in the Fort Worth Police Department.
[3] Halsell worked for several newspapers between 1942 and 1965, including the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and the Washington bureau of the Houston Post.
She covered both the Korean and Vietnam Wars as a reporter, and was a White House speech writer for President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1965 to 1968.
For Soul Sister[4] (1969), she used vitiligo-corrective medication to darken her skin and live as an African American for several months.
Some of her work is housed at Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.