Loving the Dead and Gone

Judith Turner-Yamamoto grew up in rural North Carolina in a small mill town. An art historian, she first came to writing through learning to appraise what she saw and to describe what moved her. She was the recipient of the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, the Washington Prize for Fiction, the Virginia Screenwriting Award and fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the Virginia Arts Commission, among others. Her work has appeared in StorySOUTH, Mississippi Review, The American Literary Review, and Potomac Review, and such anthologies as Walking the Edge: A Southern Gothic Anthology, Neighbors, Show Us Your Papers, Gravity Dancers, the Boom Project, and Best New Poets. An inveterate traveler, her article assignments, which include interviews with such luminaries as Frank Gehry, Annie Leibovitz, Hella Jongerius, and Lucinda Williams, have taken her all over the world, and she has published more than a thousand cover stories and features on the arts, design, architecture, interiors and gardens, travel, food, fashion, and books in such publications as The Boston Globe Magazine, Elle, Interiors, Art & Antiques, The Los Angeles Times, and Travel & Leisure. Her on-air interviews have been featured on the BBC and NPR affiliate WVXU. She has taught fiction at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center, Chautauqua Institution, the Danville Writer’s Conference, and the Writers’ Center, Bethesda, Maryland. She lives in Cincinnati, OH with her husband, environmental artist Shinji Turner-Yamamoto.