Jeffrey Dale Lofton
Official Panelist
2023 Participant · Fiction · Southern

Jeffrey Dale Lofton hails from Warm Springs, Georgia, best known as the home of Roosevelt's Little White House. He calls the nation's capital home now and has for over three decades. During those early years he spent many a night trodding the boards of DC's theaters and performing arts centers, including the Kennedy Center, Signature Theatre, Woolly Mammoth, and Studio Theatre. He even scored a few television screen appearances, including a residuals-rich Super Bowl halftime commercial, which his accountant quipped "is the finest work of your career." Ultimately he stepped away from acting, keen to use his stage- and screen-performer's deep understanding of the art of storytelling in a different way. To that end, he provided communications counsel to some of the nation's leading landscape architects, after which he worked closely with war veterans, helping them tell their stories, which add richness and nuance to historical accounts of major conflicts. At the same time, he focused on pursuing post-graduate work, ultimately being awarded Master's degrees in both Public Administration and Library and Information Science. Today, he is a senior advisor at the Library of Congress, surrounded by books and people who love books-in short, paradise. Red Clay Suzie is his first work of fiction, written through his personal lens growing up a gay, physically-misshapen outsider in a conservative family and community in the Deep South.
Book Title(s)
- Red Clay Suzie: A Novel Inspired by True Events