J.C. White, debut author of Dandelion Wine, is a former Director for a multi-jurisdictional drug and violent crimes task force, technical writer, and fiction novelist. He’s a lifelong lover of words and culture, traveling to more than forty-five countries then coming home to write about it. His career spans the shadowy worlds of undercover police work; defense contracting; real estate development; technical writer; lobbyist/advocate; and the most dangerous world of all, suburban public planning. Through it all, words were the one honest thing—sharp when they needed to be, gentle when they could afford it.
A national award-winning planner and debut novelist at sixty-one, J.C. is not starting a writing career. He’s finally clearing the table for it. His style has been characterized as: “Prose that thinks from memory and speaks in confession.” But according to J.C., “It’s just writing that’s been fully lived-in.”
J.C. was born and stayed in Middle Tennessee and writes Southern fiction; Southern Gothics and historically—regionally bent fictional stories with locally sourced ingredients. What binds it all together is that none of it is pretend. He writes gothic tropes that are awkwardly true but told with blurred faces and alias names. His stories, like the man, are Southern to the bone. Walking the line between grit, grace, and humor. He writes like a man who knows what time costs, but without taking himself too seriously. Who’s seen enough of the world to have been forged anew but misses the man he left behind. He understands that fiction—real fiction—is just truth with its mask off.
