Jon Jefferson

Jon Jefferson (born 13 November 1955) is a contemporary American author and television documentary maker. Jefferson has written eight novels in the Body Farm series under the pen name Jefferson Bass, in consultation with renowned forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Bass, as well as two non-fiction books about Dr. Bass’s life and forensic cases.

Born in St. Joseph, Missouri, Jefferson spent most of his youth in Guntersville, Alabama. As a high school senior, he was named a National Merit Scholar, a state winner in the National Council of Teachers of English writing contest, and a Presidential Scholar (one of two from Alabama). He won a scholarship to Birmingham-Southern College, where he majored in English, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He did graduate study in English and comparative literature at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Prior to writing books, Jefferson worked as a staff science writer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; as an educator and administrator at Planned Parenthood of East Tennessee; as a freelance magazine and newspaper journalist; and as a television documentary writer/producer. His great writings have been published in The New York Times, Newsweek, USA Today, and Popular Science and have been broadcast on NPR. His documentaries include programs for the A&E Network, The History Channel, and the Oxygen Network. He also wrote and directed for the National Geographic Channel a two-part documentary -- Biography of a Corpse and Anatomy of a Corpse—about the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility, which is also widely known as the Body Farm. During filming, Jefferson met the founder of the Body Farm, Dr. Bill Bass, who asked for Jefferson's assistance to write a nonfiction memoir, which was published in 2003 under the title Death’s Acre.

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