ABOUT ELIOT SEFRIN

After graduating from the City College of New York, Eliot Sefrin spent a decade working in daily newspapers as a reporter, columnist and editor writing on a wide range of topics including business, education, politics, and the environment.

In 1983, he used this experience to launch, and serve as the founding editor of Kitchen & Bath Design News, a leading monthly trade magazine.

From 1994 to 2011, Sefrin served as editorial director and publisher of KBDN, overseeing all aspects of the magazine’s operation as well as providing in-depth reporting. Recognized as an industry leader and market authority, he is a popular educator and speaker on trade-specific subjects . He currently serves as Publisher Emeritus for Kitchen & Bath Design News and its parent company, the Chicago, IL-based SOLA Group Inc. and is a member of the National Kitchen & Bath Association Hall of Fame.

In 2005, Sefrin turned his attention to novel writing, bringing parts of New York City that are often overlooked to life, and exploring the inner lives of characters. As one of the first female police officers to be deployed on street patrol in New York, Sefrin’s wife helped inspire his novels Under a Cloud, which won the 2006 PSWA Grand Prize for Fiction, and Officers Down, which won the 2022 Readers View Gold Award for General Fiction.

The Death of Dahlgren Place focuses on a Brooklyn street faced with rapid change when the plans for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge are made public. Blood in the Promised Land follows two men, one a black migrant from the South and one a Jewish physician fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe, in a struggling America.

Port City, Sefrin’s new novel, brings the working-class history of New York’s tugboat men to the page in a story of power, greed, and the struggle for compromise. The harbor itself becomes a character as Sefrin paints a picture of a city that has just reached its full height–wealthy, vital, and the hub of global trade. In the joyful days after the end of the second World War, those who have been holding their breath and hoping for better pay are ready for a change that is not coming without a fight. Soon the union representing the tugboat workers is locked in a stalled negotiation with the tugboat owners that threatens to cripple the thriving city. The story of how this historical moment finds an end is a love letter to a city whose throbbing heart is the people who live within it.

A Brooklyn native, Eliot Sefrin now lives outside Wilmington, NC with his wife, Rosalyn, a former New York City police officer.