J.M. Redmann

J.M. Redmann was born in Biloxi, Mississippi and has yet to recover. She grew up in Ocean Springs, a small town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. At eighteen, determined to get out of the South, she headed north to Vassar College. During her freshman year, she was asked by the Daughters of the Confederacy to make her debut. She declined their offer, and came out in a very different way. The day after she graduated from college, she got on a train for New York City. Determined not to become a rich yuppie, Ms. Redmann embarked on a career in theatrical lighting (including a stint as the lightening director of the New York Playboy Club. Yes, really). Riches never once darkened her door. To this day, they remain far afield.

Missing crawfish and king cake, Redmann returned to her ancestral home of New Orleans. Laissez les bon temps rouler. (No way going back to Mississippi. There is a reason they make those jokes about that place.) 

With a degree in drama, Redmann ended up with a day job in public health. She worked in theater just as her co-workers could come to work with a cough and then their funeral was three weeks later. As Camus says, ‘it matters what you do in times of plague.’ She has since continued working in HIV/AIDS and is now the Director of Prevention (meetings, lots and lots of meetings, reports, even more of those) for CrescentCare, an organization that has transformed from an AIDS service organization to a community health center. It keeps her in contact with the areas of New Orleans that the tourists don’t see and allows her to order things that are called educational demonstrators in grants, but most people refer to as dildos. Yeah, nothing like opening the latest shipment just as the bug man comes to spray the office. 

She currently writes two series in her copious spare time, a new one as R. Jean Read for Midnight Ink. The first, ROOTS OF MURDER, was out in 2016 and the second, PERDITION, came out summer of 2017. She is better known (five people instead of two) under the name J.M.Redmann, for which she writes the trashy, southern gothic lesbian detective series featuring Micky Knight. Her latest is THE GIRL ON THE EDGE OF SUMMER, which came out in the spring of 2017. Previous books include ILL WILL, which won a Lambda Literary award, Fore Word mystery award and made the American Library Association GLBT Roundtable’s 2013 Over theRainbow list. THE INTERSECTION OF LAW AND DESIRE and DEATH OF A DYING MAN won Lambda Literary Awards. LAW & DESIRE was an Editor’s Choice of the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Redmann was inducted as a Literary Saint into the Saints and Sinners Hall of Fame—first and last time she’ll ever be a saint. Her books have been translated into Spanish, German, Dutch, Norwegian and Hebrew and one short story even made it into Korean. She is the co-editor with Greg Herren of three anthologies, NIGHT SHADOWS: QUEER HORROR, WOMEN OFTHE MEAN STREETS: LESBIAN NOIR, and MEN OF THE MEAN STREETS: GAY NOIR. Redmann currently lives in an historic neighborhood in New Orleans, at the edge of the area that flooded. She is the first to admit that this isn't exactly what she had planned. When pressed, she will admit that few things are as she had planned.