Jamie Langston Turner

In 2016, after forty-four years in the classroom, Jamie Langston Turner retired from teaching creative writing courses at Bob Jones University in Greenville, SC. Born in Mississippi, she has lived in the South all her life and has set most of her books in South Carolina. Her first novel, Suncatchers, was published in 1995 by Thomas Nelson, and her next six were published by Bethany House from 1998-2009: Some Wildflower in My Heart, By the Light of a Thousand Stars, A Garden to Keep, No Dark Valley, Winter Birds, and Sometimes a Light Surprises. Her eighth novel, To See the Moon Again, was published in 2014 by Penguin/Berkley. Her ninth, published on Amazon in 2023, is Every Ocean Has a Shore. Winner of two Christy Awards for Excellence and a Christianity Today Book Award of Merit, Jamie is currently working on a tenth novel but would like to offer this tip to aspiring young writers: "Discipline yourself to write steadily in your youth because although you will always find plenty of material to write about as you get older, you will lose speed. It just happens." She also wants to let you know that while she wishes she still looked like the photo on this page, she doesn't. Taken two years before she retired, this photo was the only one the Amazon site deemed professional enough to accept. Jamie has been married to Daniel Turner, a retired music professor, for fifty-one years. They have one son, Jess, who is a composer, a daughter-in-law who is a professor, and three wonderful grandchildren.