J.C. White

J.C. White is an American suburban planner, technical writer, and fiction novelist. He’s a lifelong lover of words and culture, traveling to more than forty-five countries with his loving wife, Emily, and coming home to write about it. His career spans the shadowy worlds of undercover drug & violent crimes enforcement, private investigator at home and abroad, a defense contractor, real estate developer, a technical writer, lobbyist/advocate for public safety, and the most dangerous world of all, suburban public planning. Through it all, writing words was 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, Chris is not starting a writing career. He’s finally clearing the table for it. His style has been characterized as: “Prose that thinks in memory and speaks in confession.” But according to Chris, “It’s just writing that’s been fully lived-in.”

Chris writes Southern fiction. Southern gothics and historically and regionally bent threads. What binds it all together is that none of it is pretend. Chris 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. Who’s seen enough of the world to have been forged anew but misses the Chris he left behind. He understands that fiction—real fiction—is just truth with its mask off.