I knew from the time I was eight years old that I would be a writer. I was always writing little stories and making little books. I was that kid always making up plays and getting her sisters and friends to play the parts. As I grew up, that love for writing morphed into careers in journalism where I was telling human interest stories, and then, public relations and development where I was telling the stories of non-profits and organizations. Eventually, I leaned into my desire to get back to writing fiction and I dove headfirst into screenwriting. I found my forensic, crime writing voice and started to write a bunch of film and TV scripts. As these began to pile up, I got the spark of an idea to turn them into novels. It wasn't soon after that I found myself teaching a day-long forensic bootcamp for writers at the ACFW conference in 2014. That's where I met Julie Gwinn. It was the final hours of the conference and I was standing in line at the Starbucks when someone introduce her to me because they knew I was looking for a literary agent. We probably said five sentences to each other, but that was the start of my journey with Julie and Seymour! I had never written a novel before, so Julie TOTALLY took a chance on me. I spent the next year writing my first novel under Julie's gentle guidance. Then Julie spent the next year plus trying to sell it. In the meantime I had written a movie, God Bless the Broken Road, and we decided to novelize it. That was actually my first book contract! I remember I wrote the first three chapters while we were filming. Two weeks after I turned in those pages, we received several offers. We chose one and that was my first fiction contract with a publisher! It wasn't long after we sold my first novel to another publisher.
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| Jennifer's Newest Release, Hole in the Woods |
About the Author, Jennifer Graeser Dornbush:
Jennifer Graeser Dornbush is a screenwriter, author, international speaker and forensic specialist. As she says, “I grew up around death.”
The television or movie screen is the closest most people will ever come to witnessing the forensic world. But Jennifer was raised in it, as the daughter of a small town medical examiner whose office was in their home. There were body parts in the fridge. She investigated her first fatality, an airplane crash, when she was 8 years old, picking up pieces of skull with her father who simply saw it as an anatomy lesson. It was the first of many coroner lessons she experienced over two decades.
After exploring journalism and high school teaching, Jennifer turned seriously to screenwriting where she began to connect her coroner world to her writing. She sought out a degree at the Forensic Science Academy in Los Angeles to gain more forensic training and earned a unique kinship with LA’s top CSIs, fingerprint specialists, DNA scientists and detectives. To share her love of forensics with the writing world, she authored the top-selling non-fiction authoritative book, Forensic Speak, used not only by show-runners and writers, but also crime investigators and law enforcement. As a forensic consultant, she is frequently asked to consult with TV writers on shows such as Bull, Conviction, Hawaii Five-O, Leverage, Suits and Rectify.
She created an Amazon top-selling mystery novel series, The Coroner’s Daughter. The first book in the series, The Coroner, released August 2018. The second in the series, Secret Remains, released January 2020. She is developing the series for TV. She wrote the theatrically released film and novel, God Bless the Broken Road (2018). She has developed a TV crime drama series with Echo Lake and Hoplite Entertainment. She also adapted a popular YA novel to script and sold a children’s show.
She teaches screenwriting and mentors aspiring writers. Jennifer is a member of the Writers’ Guild of America, Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America and FBI Citizen’s Academy Alumni. And she has a great sense of gallows humor.
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