Judith Turner-Yamamoto discussing and signing Loving the Dead and Gone

Wednesday, September 7 at 7pm ET

Location: Joseph-Beth Rookwood

Join us for Judith Turner-Yamamoto discussing and signing Loving the Dead and Gone.

The death of Donald Ray in a freak car accident becomes the catalyst for the release of an insular southern community’s passions, needs, and hurts. Clayton's discovery of dead Donald Ray upends his longtime emotional numbness. Darlene, the seventeen-year-old widow, struggles to reconnect with her late husband while proving herself still alive. Soon Clayton and Darlene's bond of loss and death works its magic, drawing them into an affair that brings the loneliness in Clayton's marriage to a crisis. When Aurilla Cutter, Clayton's mother-in-law, learns about the affair, her own memories of longing and infidelity are set loose. Like Darlene's passions—unappeased and clung to—Aurilla's possess an intensity that denies life to the present. As Aurilla's own forbidden and tragic story of love, death, and repeated loss alternates with Darlene's and Clayton's, the divide of generations narrows and collapses, building to the unlikely collision of the two women's yearnings that frees them both from the past. Loving the Dead and Gone is a lyrical novel about how tragedy binds people even more lastingly than passion.

Judith Turner-Yamamoto was finalist for the 2020 Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction for Loving the Dead and Gone. 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. She has published more than 1000 articles on the arts, interiors, travel, and food in The Boston Globe Magazine, Elle, Traditional Home, Interiors, Art & Antiques, Travel & Leisure, US Air, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Times, American Photo, and Southern Accents. Her on-air interviews have been featured on NPR station WVXU.