Eliot Sefrin has been a journalist and author for 40+ years. A native of Brooklyn and a graduate of the City College
of New York, he began his career as a newspaper reporter, covering such topics as politics, business, education, health, and the environment. After a time as a feature writer and newspaper editor, he founded, edited, and published a trade magazine for nearly three decades. Port City is his fourth novel.
Sefrin’s most recent novel, Officers Down, was a critically acclaimed, award-winning story about a controversial police shooting in a poverty-stricken, minority neighborhood in 1970s New York. This fictional story, based on a composite of real-life events, explores the sensitive and divisive issue of race relations in America within the context of a tragic police shooting that becomes a lightning rod for racial tension, while profoundly reshaping the lives of those most closely impacted by the incident.
Blood in the Promised Land chronicles the parallel journeys of two very different men during World War II – a black migrant who flees the South to work in Pittsburgh’s booming steel industry and a Jewish physician forced to escape Nazi-occupied Europe – whose fateful encounter enables them to exorcise the ghosts of their past and thrusts them into the crucible of the civil rights movement. HIs first book, The Death of Dahlgren Place, chronicles the triumph and turmoil tied to the 1960s construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the related destruction of a beloved Brooklyn neighborhood.