In Loving Memory

Author and writer Gail Paige Shepherd of Lake Worth, FL died suddenly of complications from a brain tumor on February 24, 2020. She was 62.

Gail wrote long-form profiles and investigative pieces and an award-winning restaurant column for New Times in Palm Beach County. Her columns appeared in the Best American Food Writing. She was also an investigative journalist for Palm Beach Free Press.

She graduated from the University of Florida where she also completed an MFA, Summa Cum Laude. She was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Gail was also a poet, and her work was published in Poetry Magazine, the Yale Review, Black Warrior among others. She was runner up for the Yale Series Younger Poets award two years in a row. She also won a Society of Professional Journalist award for feature writing, and was twice given an award from the Association of Food Journalists for Best Newspaper Restaurant Criticism, and first place James Beard Award for best newspaper feature writing. Gail and her brother published a local newspaper, Red Herring, where in her own words they “poked relentless fun at all of the fancy bigwigs in town, and I hope we made them mighty uncomfortable for a while.”

Gail was an inspiration to everyone who knew her. She was a hero, friend and mentor to so many of us. We’ll remember the way she challenged our minds and helped us grow as humans. We’ll hear her gentle prose before we fall asleep and we’ll dream of the estimable life she led for us to follow.

How I Got To Be Me

My first famous literary work was our third-grade Thanksgiving play, “Poor Mr. Turkey,” reasonably well received by the nine, ten- and eleven-year-old critics in the audience. I wrote tons of (pretty good) poetry in elementary school, a lot of (really bad) poetry as a teenager, and then some more (better) poetry in college and graduate school. Eventually my professors had had enough of me, so they signed off on a creative thesis of original poetry and translations of French poets.

Then I did a bunch of writing for a long time for anybody who would pay me. I wrote about rebar and storm windows for a construction newsletter, about ladies undergarments for a fashion catalog; I wrote witty reviews of internet radio stations, and advertisements about the benefits of skateboards and crash helmets and rollerblades. Then I got a job with some real newspapers and magazines and wrote a lot of dreary news stories about murderers and scam artists and people who got paralyzed from bad Botox injections.

I also ran my own local indie newspaper for a while. We poked relentless fun at all the fancy bigwigs in town, and I hope we made them mighty uncomfortable for a while.

Eventually, somebody offered to pay me to write about dinner! I got to eat every night at restaurants for free! I liked that job a lot and I gained twenty pounds. This whole time, I was drafting stories and novels on the side.

Painting of my dogs
Snappy & Charlie

Eventually, my employer got tired of me, and while I was unemployed, I wrote my very first novel for kids. It was about a girl who got sent away from Earth to a planet called Paradox that was entirely populated by talking animals, some of whom were quite unsavory and unscrupulous.

One thing led to another, and that other eventually became THE TRUE HISTORY OF LYNDIE B. HAWKINS. It was a long journey here, but the one thing that never changed was writing, writing, and more writing. I hope you love Lyndie. I hope she inspires you to seek the truth, learn from history, and write some stories of your own.

I live in Florida now with my little family, my dogs, and a lot of mosquitos!

 

Click here for my “official” (serious) bio.

  Author Bio at Penguin Random House