Biography

Deborah spent her summers growing up in the Great Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina which is the setting for her suspense thriller novels and many of her short stories.

As well as a suspense thriller novelist, Deborah J Ledford is a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize in the short story category. Her award-winning short stories appear in numerous print publications as well as literary and mystery anthologies. She is most proud of her stories that appear in the Sisters in Crime Chapter Desert Sleuths anthologies How NOT to Survive a Vacation and How NOT to Survive the Holidays (DS Publishing, 2009, 2010) and "The Spot" which is featured in Murder in the Wind (Second Wind Publishing, 2010)

She began her writing career as a screenwriter and wrote, directed and edited her first short film, "Blind Ambitions" as an entry into Scottsdale, Arizona's first international film festival. "Blind Ambitions" won Third Place in that competition, as well as Honorable Mention in the Tucson International Film Festival.  From there, she wrote the full-length version of the same script as well as six other original full-length screenplays.

In a quest to produce her screenplays, Deborah launched her own independent film production company IOF Productions Ltd . In the '90s, she assisted other independent film production companies (in a co-production capacity) composing investment prospectus packages, choosing scripts, scouting shooting locations, compiling and structuring budgets/day-out-of-day lists/character and scene breakdowns in order to present fully fundable projects for investors.

She is currently writing her fifth novel of suspense and the screenplay for her current novel, SNARE.

Trade Associations