Full Bio
Georgia Jeffries is the author of The Younger Girl, a Midwest noir based on a true crime of murder and family betrayal crossing three generations. Selected as one of five finalists for the 2025 Bridge Book Award by the American Academy in Rome, it has earned international attention and critical praise.
Georgia is also a writer/producer of Emmy Award-winning drama. Her screenplays have been acclaimed by the Los Angeles Times as “devastating, standing-ovation television.” She has created multi-dimensional protagonists that transcend cultural stereotypes and became the first individual female screenwriter to earn a Writers Guild Award for Episodic Drama for her work on the ground-breaking series Cagney & Lacey.
As Supervising Producer of ABC’s China Beach, a Peabody Award winner for its depiction of the Vietnam War, she was a Humanitas Prize nominee for her teleplay starring Oscar- winner Haing Ngor. For NBC she wrote the Sisters script that won Sela Ward her first Emmy for Best Actress and for CBS co-executive produced New York News, starring Mary Tyler Moore and Madelaine Kahn.
Georgia created a dozen original drama series pilots for ABC, CBS, NBC, Showtime, Warner Brothers TV and MGM-TV. She then went on to write and executive produce cable and feature screenplays for HBO, Showtime, USA, Lifetime, and Universal Pictures.
She has adapted several book-to-film projects: the NY Times Notable Book, Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine by Bebe Moore Campbell; Tin Wife by Joe Flaherty (filmed as My Husband’s Secret Life starring Oscar nominee, Anne Archer); and the bestselling memoir, Walking Out on the Boys by Frances Conley. She has also served as a script doctor on selected scripts, including HBO’s Iron-Jawed Angels, starring Oscar-winner Hilary Swank.
Her body of work has been recognized with a variety of awards during her career. Her first feature screenplay, Nobody’s Fool, won the Special Jury Award at the Houston International Film Festival. Since then she has been honored with multiple Writers Guild Awards, Emmy and Golden Globe nominations, the Humanitas Prize for Outstanding Story Editing, the Inter-Guild Merit Award and the Women’s International Film & Television Showcase Screenwriter of the Year Award.
Also a writer of short fiction, her stories have been published in several anthologies. Odd Partners, edited by Anne Perry, includes Georgia’s work with Edgar® Award acclaimed authors, William Kent Krueger, Jacqueline Winspear, and Jeffrey Deaver. Her story of a Rose Bowl Princess turned felon, “What Would Nora Do?,” was described by LA Weekly columnist/novelist Jervey Tervalon, as “domestic tragedy brilliantly segueing into comic farce.” An Amazon Editors’ Pick, it is also available on audiobook.
Another story, “Little Egypt,” appears in Made-in-LA: Hollywood Adjacent, Volume 6, and was praised by Los Angeles Review of Books Editor-in-Chief Boris Dralyuk, as “a firecracker of a tale…the ending is perfect and gut-wrenching.” It was selected by the American Library Association Book Club as recommended reading during Short Story Month.
Her non-fiction profiles include “The Last Gun of Tibercio Vasquez,”(on KCET-TV’s Artbound) as well as HuffPosts “Performance Art” about the disappearance of New York socialite Irene Silverman.
She is a former Contributing Editor to the WGA magazine, Written By. Her essay, “The First Time They Told Me I Write Like a Man,” was commissioned for The First Time I Got Paid For It… Writers’ Tales From The Hollywood Trenches (Harper-Collins). Her commentary on her work as an executive producer appears in the Showtime documentary, Buried.
Appointed to the tenured faculty at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, Georgia created the first undergraduate television thesis at an American university. Her work has been profiled in Women Who Run The Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood; and Television’s Second Golden Age, “the return of the serious, literary, writer-based drama.”
She has guest lectured at the American Film Institute, Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Paley Center for Media, Humanitas Institute Master Writers Seminars, the Banff International Television Festival, the Melbourne National Screenwriting Conference, Australian Film Institute and Bouchercon, the international writers’ conferences in Toronto, New Orleans and San Diego. Selected for the National Speaker’s Bureau of Sisters-in-Crime, she has been a co-panelist at Mystery Writers of America events with author/screenwriters, Megan Abbott, T. Jefferson Parker, and Attica Locke.
Georgia has served as Executive Vice-President of the Writers Guild Foundation Board of Trustees, Women in Film and PEN USA West. She was also a judge for the MWA Edgar® Awards, the WGA Awards, and the annual Voice Awards which recognize film and television that educate the public about mental health, addiction and recovery.
A UCLA cum laude graduate, she started her career as a journalist with American Film magazine where she profiled independent filmmakers, Robert Altman, Frank Oz, Joan Tewkesbury, Bill Benenson and Paul Mazursky. Her cover story on Boulevard Nights documented the filming of the first major studio drama exploring Chicano life in the barrio. Born in the Illinois heartland, Georgia came of age in the San Francisco Bay area and the wilds of Los Angeles.
In The Beginning
From early Illinois roots to teenage years in the San Francisco Bay Area to a career as a Hollywood writer-producer-cinema professor, the guiding lights of my life have been family and writing.
When my daughter started nursery school, her teacher asked each student to tell the class what their parents did for a living. Her answer? “My mommy is a storyteller.”
But the stories I tell—from screenwriting to prose—are a particular kind. Each one begins with a character, incident or experience anchored in “real life.”
Growing up as an only child in the Midwest, I spent my playtime reading historical biographies about young heroines with the courage to challenge themselves and any earthly obstacles in their path. Their stories of trial and triumph were true, not some make-believe fairy tales for kids.
At the same time my favorite TV show was The Twilight Zone, a series exploring the adventures of ordinary people venturing into spectral realms that transformed them in extraordinary ways.
Even now, as a professional “storyteller” for many years, what fascinates me is what formed my childhood. True stories. Heroines seeking justice. Mystery and mysticism. Welcome to The Younger Girl…