Thrilled to share LOVING THE DEAD AND GONE is the 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYS) Gold Medalist in Southern Regional Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Awards Grand Prize and awarded an honorable mention in General Fiction! Thanks to Publishers Weekly for calling LOVING THE DEAD AND GONE "A bittersweet fantastical debut." 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. Her fiction has appeared in StorySOUTH, Mississippi Review, Deep South Magazine, and American Literary Review, among others, and in many anthologies, including Walking the Edge: A Southern Gothic Anthology, Show Us Your Papers, and Gravity Dancers. She has been awarded scholarships, fellowships, and residencies by the Virginia Arts Commission, Ohio Arts Council, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Chautauqua Writers’ Center, VCCA, and the Kentucky Humanities Speakers Bureau. Her other awards include the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, the Washington Prize for Fiction, and the Virginia Screenwriting Award. An art historian, over 1000 articles have appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine, Elle, Interiors, Art & Antiques, The Los Angeles Times, and Travel & Leisure, and many others. She has taught fiction at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center, Chautauqua Institution, the Danville Writer’s Conference, and the Writers’ Center, Bethesda, Maryland. www.turneryamamoto.com