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Jeffrey is a Canadian writer best known for the Dan Sharp mysteries and the Bradford Fairfax mysteries. He is also a poet, songwriter, filmmaker, editor, and photographer. Much of his work concerns issues facing the queer community, with an emphasis on moral complexity and diversity.

He was born in Sudbury, Ontario, lived in Windsor, Ontario, was educated in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and resides in Toronto, Ontario. In the 1990s, his work as assistant editor at Pink Triangle Press’s Xtra! Magazine allowed him to establish The Church-Wellesley Review as Canada’s first creative writing journal for the LGBTQ community.

His novels include A Cage of Bones, the Lambda Award-winning Lake on the Mountain, as well as six subsequent Dan Sharp novels, the Bradford Fairfax mysteries, and The Honey Locust, Endgame, The Sulphur Springs Cure and The English Tutor.

Early Life

Jeffrey grew up in Sudbury, a mid-Ontario mining town. He is the eldest child of Leonard Raymond Round, a salesman for General Electric, and Loretta Marion Round (née Lauretta White), a homemaker and secretary. The family included two other brothers, Mark and Brian.

The Rounds were middle-class. Leonard raised himself up from an impoverished family. His step-father, an alcoholic, was a bookkeeper and his mother a domestic. Lauretta was the daughter of a general store owner (father) and a truck driving mother who sold tombstones in their rural Nova Scotia community. The Whites were descended from Empire Loyalists, and had been granted land by King George III.

The Rounds lived briefly in Windsor, where Jeffrey witnessed the burning of Detroit from across the river during the Detroit Riot. On moving back to Sudbury, he attended Winston Churchill Junior High, a somewhat radical-for-the-times school influenced by the principles of the progressive Summerhill School in England, then went on to LaSalle Secondary High before moving to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

In Halifax, he enrolled at Dalhousie University when he was 17, intending to concentrate on theatre, music and English. He dropped out of theatre and music to concentrate on English and psychology, graduating with a Bachelor’s Degree. While there, he wrote and edited for the student paper, the Dalhousie Gazette.

Early Adulthood

After moving to Toronto in his early-twenties, he studied at Ryerson University’s Film and Television program. He had a relationship with artist Michael Ridler before moving briefly to England and Italy to pursue a career as a fashion model.

On his return to Toronto, he took up a position as stage manager for Toronto Truck Theatre’s long-running The Mousetrap, and was later director (1995-1998) for three of its record-breaking twenty-seven-year run. He also attended the Tarragon Theatre’s Young Playwrights Unit.

He had a relationship with John Davison, a technical writer, with whom he started Best Boys Productions, an experimental and independent queer theatre company. Together they produced three seasons of plays, full-length and short, including works by Round and various collaborators, as well as the dramedy Blessed, by Dawn Rae Downton.

Davison was instrumental in setting up an LGBTQ group at Canada’s IBM, which advocated for same-sex spousal rights. Pink Stripes was the first group ever to win corporate spousal benefits for same-sex partners. The ruling paved the way for corporations worldwide to follow the same path.

Literary Career

Jeffrey’s first literary aspirations were achieved in theatre. While directing the long-running The Mousetrap, he also produced several of his own plays. With Best Boys production, he and partner John Davison produced Zebra, Driving to Tatamagouche, Wendy Falling, Five Easy Pieces, and The Michael Ridler Project, about his relationship with artist Michael Ridler. A final play, The Visitations of Captain John, was workshopped at the Canadian Stage Theatre with Gordon Pinsent in the title role. In 2025 it received a staged reading at the Theatre on King in Peterborough, Ontario, under Nfld. writer and dramaturge Kate Storey.

His first novel was A Cage of Bones, published by the Gay Men’s Press UK. It dealt with his brief career as a model. Unable to sell his second and third books, he wrote a comic mystery, The P’Town Murders, featuring protagonist Bradford Fairfax. It was published in the US by the Haworth Press and in Canada by Cormorant Books, where he established a working relationship with editor Marc Coté.

Cormorant released his unpublished third novel, The Honey Locust, about the Bosnian War, and the second Bradford Fairfax book, Death in Key West. Dundurn Press published his next book, Lake on the Mountain, which won a Lambda Award for Best Gay Mystery for 2012. Six more titles followed in the series, two of which were again nominated for Lambdas.

Tightrope Books published his first poetry collection, In the Museum of Leonardo da Vinci, in 2014. His second collection, Threads, was published by Beautiful Dreamer Press in 2022.

A stand-alone mystery, Endgame, was published by Dundurn. An updating of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, it was Dundurn’s biggest e-book seller in the US that year (2016).

More recently he has a seen a return to Cormorant with The Sulphur Springs Cure (2024), an historical mystery, and The English Tutor (2025) from Rebel Satori Press.

Editorial and Festivals

Round’s first attempts at editing began in junior high, when he and several other students compiled a magazine called Midnight Hag, a limited-edition publication produced on a mimeograph. The inclusion of lyrics from the Who’s Acid Queen from the rock opera Tommy caused it to be seized and destroyed by the school authorities.

The Church-Wellesley Review ran as an annual insert in Xtra! Magazine from 1991-2000, as well as an on-line quarterly for the final three years. Its intent was to give voice to the under-represented queer community. The review introduced then-new voices from the LGBTQ community such as Shyam Selvadurai, Dale Peck, Elizabeth Ruth, Gordon Stewart Anderson, Camilla Gibb, Michael V Smith, Brian Francis, and numerous others. It was then and continues to be widely championed by many. It has been preserved in the National Archives of Canada.

Round began a series of annual readings to accompany The Church-Wellesley Review publications at various locations in the gay community at Church and Wellesley. The series ended with the folding of the print review.

He next began a series of quarterly readings, Proust and Company, at Glad Day Books in their Yonge Street location. The series was created to promote queer literature and bring financial support to the flagging Glad Day Bookshop, then the world’s longest surviving gay bookstore. When the store changed ownership and moved to Church Street, he co-created the Naked Heart Festival of Words, which came to be known as Canada’s most culturally diverse literary festival.

Film, Television, Video, Photography

Round’s first film was the short comedy, My Heart Belongs to Daddy. It premiered at The Director’s View Film Festival in Norwalk Ct, and won awards for Best Canadian Director, Best Use of Music, and others at several different festivals.

At the time of its release, he was working for Canada’s HGTV as a segment producer for the DIY series Just Ask Jon Eakes and the Food Network’s Kitchen Equipped.

He was invited by poet and musician bill bissett (Order of Canada) to create a photography show at the Secret Handshake Gallery in Toronto. The exhibition consisted of 62 original photographs under the title Voyeur. It was on display from February to May, 2024.

Using his own music as inspiration, he created the music videos Araby (featuring Filipina-Canadian soprano Lilac Caña), Don’t You Think I Know and Gone Again.

Awards and Recognition

Round’s first career award was the Right to Privacy Award from the Gay and Lesbian Appeal for his stage play Zebra, about the gay-bashing murder of Toronto librarian Kenneth Zeller, produced at the Poor Alex Theatre in 1993. It was also nominated for a Trillium Award from the Trillium Monarchist Society.

His film, My Heart Belongs to Daddy, won the Schweppes Prize at the Canadian Short Film Festival, as well as Best Canadian Director and Best Use of Music at the Hollywood North Film Festival. He also won a Canada Council Production Grant to make the film.

His literary war novel, The Honey Locust, was nominated for a ReLit Award for best independent press novel. His poetry collection, In the Museum of Leonardo da Vinci, was also nominated for a ReLit award for poetry.

His first Dan Sharp mystery, Lake on the Mountain, won the Lambda Award for Best Gay Mystery of 2012. Two subsequent titles, After the Horses and The God Game, were nominated for the same award.

He was invited by the William Faulkner Society to read from his novel Bon Ton Roulet, alongside New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, on the 300th anniversary of the founding of New Orleans.

He won a Canada Council Mid-Career Grant for his novel The English Tutor, and several Ontario Arts Council recommender grants for several titles.

In 2024, he was a featured author at the Toronto International Festival of Author’s Motive Festival for his historical novel, The Sulphur Springs Cure.

His music video Don’t You Think I Know won several awards, including Best Juried Video from the Europe Music Festival U.K. and Tagore International Film Festival. A follow-up, Gone Again, won the Luis Buñuel Memorial Award.