Judith (J.J.) Dutra

J.J. Dutra writes from North Truro, Massachusetts, at the narrow end of Cape Cod. A retired registered nurse and the wife of a commercial dragger captain, she spent decades on the working side of a fishing town — the waiting, the weather reports, the auctions, the boats that came back and the ones that didn't.

That life became Nautical Twilight (2011), her account of a Cape Cod fishing family and of an industry moving into its own last light. It was followed by her first novel, The Fishermen's Ball (2015), and its sequel, Dead Low Tide (2018) — mysteries set in the Provincetown of the late 1930s, where a police chief's plain routine keeps running into things the town would rather bury.

She has read from her work at libraries across the Outer Cape, and continues to write about the harbor she knows best.