John Jeffire was born in Detroit. His novel "Motown Burning" won the 2005 Mount Arrowsmith Novel Competition and the 2007 Independent Publishing Awards Gold Medal for Regional Fiction. Detroiter and former U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine called his first poetry collection, "Stone + Fist + Brick + Bone," “a terrific one for our city.” In 2022, his novel "River Rouge" won the American Writing Award for Legacy Fiction.