

Dahlonega
Literary Festival
An Annual Celebration of Readers, Writers, and Books
Jeff Duffey
Barbara Roquemore

Barbara and I wrote SEARCH: A Guide to College and Life . Below are our biographies.
Jeff Duffey: When Barbara and I met we did not realize both of our dad's were connected to the circus. At 58, my dad became a Shriner clown. Like Barbara’s dad, he too grew up during the Great Depression. Dad pushed a mower to cut the lawns of Middle Ga. College his freshman year. He fell a hundred dollars short of raising enough money to return. Even if it meant working two jobs, my dad was determined that his kids would complete college. When I started college, I had turned 17 the week before. I had no idea just how inexperienced, poor, inattentive, and out-of-my-league I was. I did know one thing. I had to make it. My dad was right. Davidson College changed my life. I want you to use this book to open your eyes to what is ahead, so you too will make it.
Barbara Roquemore: If I had any doubt about my need for college, a summer working in a hot cotton mill settled it. When I wonder where I got the belief that I could be the first in my family to go to college, I remember my dad. He ran away from his orphanage with his younger brother during the Great Depression to join the circus where he became a trapeze artist. I paid my way through college keeping the books for the service station where I and other coeds, wearing bikinis, pumped gas for tourists going to Florida. After-hours and weekends, I ironed new shipments of clothing for a dress store, was a hand and foot model, and won a beauty contest for prize money to supplement a small academic scholarship. I tell my students, “if a poor Appalachian girl with circus roots can complete college, anyone can.” (Barbara enjoyed spending a month at Oxford in 1988 studying UK schools.)
Here are our credentials:
Dr. Jeff Duffey has been the board-certified psychiatrist for GCSU’s Counseling Center for 10 years. A Davidson and Medical College of Georgia graduate, he completed his psychiatric residency at Baltimore’s Sheppard-Pratt Hospital. He has been a clinical Assistant Professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland, Emory University, and Mercer University Medical Schools. He has treated students in an adolescent psych hospital, a residential treatment center, and his private practice. Jeff and Barbara are married and live outside Atlanta.
Dr. Barbara Roquemore is an Associate Professor in the Department of Professional Learning and Innovation and Director of the Doctoral Program at Georgia College and State University. Before coming to GCSU 14 years ago, she completed a 34-year career in K-12 education as a high school basketball coach, English teacher, principal, curriculum director, and an assistant school superintendent. A Tift College graduate, she got her M.Ed. at Georgia State University and her Ed.D. at the University of Georgia.
Search: A Guide for College and Life
If you’re searching for the right mindset and skills to succeed in your studies and relationships,for inspiration and strategies to sustain your confidence and reduce stress, for warning about the things and people that might sandbag you and how to avoid them, then you’ve found the right book.
SEARCH draws from the authors’ extensive experience, as well as their students’ and colleagues’. It offers you realistic specifics about such topics as how to manage your time, discourage unwanted attention, make polite conversation, and avoid sickness and despair. SEARCH will teach you money management. For instance, unless you are buying the print book as an ideal graduation present to be read at home during COVID-19, buying the ebook will save you money and allow you to link directly to many resources.
Gaining skills and factual knowledge are only parts of the college experience. College provides opportunities to explore the nature of the human spirit as it has manifested throughout history. You join humankind in searching to understand how things work, why we do what we do, and where each of us fits in. Whether you are following in your parents’ footsteps or blazing a trail as a first-generation college student, SEARCH will provide strategies for this lifelong adventure.Learn to make a budget, pick the right major and courses, or go to school living at home. SEARCH will help you understand social groups, survive spring break, overcome insecurity, and savor diversity. You will read about how to assess your date, cope with stalkers, and get through break-ups. Besides practical tips, it will help you address the flood of added freedoms, new ideas, and different ways of living and thinking you will experience.
SEARCH is a thoughtful, compassionate, open-minded discussion of both the practical and philosophical realities of college and life that non-students will find relevant as well. Like life, college can be a challenging, soul-searching, gut-wrenching experience at times. College is a serious undertaking. It calls for a guide that takes college seriously. Luckily, its just a click away from being yours.