Jackie Flaum

Historical fiction writer and Kentucky native Jackie Ross Flaum lived what she writes about. Her high school graduating class became the first in Ashland, Kentucky to integrate. She spent her summers on her grandmother’s farm absorbing Appalachian and family lore.

After a year at the University of Georgia during the age of white women/colored women restrooms, she graduated from the University of Kentucky.

She began her adult career as a reporter for "The Hartford Courant" in Hartford, Conn in the heyday of newspaper journalism and civil rights unrest.

She married another Courant reporter, had two daughters, moved to Memphis where she worked in speechwriting and public relations. Writing in Tennessee has her suffering déjà vu.

A former president of Malice in Memphis a Killer Writing Group, she currently serves as member-at-large.

Since becoming a fiction writer, she won first place for romantic suspense in the 21st annual Duel on the Delta and second place in the spring 2019 Short Story Land online competition.

Her Sterling Brothers Ltd historical suspense/thriller series follows Madeline Sterling and Socrates Gray, a Black man and a white women, as they investigate murder and dodge killers in the deep South of the 1960s. The second in that series won honorable mention in the 2025 Great Southeast Book Festival and was named the Claymore Silver Falchion Top Choice at Killer Nashville. The third book in the series will be out this fall.

In her spare time, she loves water aerobics, bridge, and Team Read, a second-grade volunteer tutoring program that offers her the chance to create new readers for future writers.