A chance encounter with a forgotten childhood friend makes a woman take stock of her own shortcomings through the years. A rural family's peaceful Sunday night is disrupted by a frightening, unexpected visitor. A charming blind student brings a new perspective to an emotionally distant teacher. A woman is eyewitness to a neighbor's struggle with alcoholism and the tragic outcome of his problems. These incidents and many others are captured in A Place That Was Home. Chronicling a Western North Carolina woman’s experiences from the 1960s to the present, the twenty-one personal essays in A Place That Was Home vividly depict a regional world in which families live, work, and worship and others suffer from dire circumstances. A Place That Was Home invites the reader into this compelling world."

Julia Nunnally Duncan was born and raised in Marion, North Carolina, a town thirty miles east of Asheville, the birthplace of Thomas Wolfe. Having started writing stories and poems in her childhood, Julia now draws inspiration from her 1960s upbringing in a textile mill town. Her personal essays chronicle her life in Western North Carolina and events and people from her community, often capturing the quirky and peculiar situations that small Southern towns sometimes produce. Her debut essay collection A Place That Was Home is a compilation of such essays, vividly depicting a regional world in which families live, work, and worship and others suffer from dire circumstances. Julia’s works have been praised by many renowned writers, including Lee Smith, Ron Rash, Joseph Bathanti, and Robert Inman. Lee Smith says: “Julia Nunnally Duncan writes direct, precise-yet-lyrical prose, which serves to ground the extraordinary things which happen to the ordinary people in her stories.” Ron Rash notes: “Duncan has the talent and empathy to make seemingly ordinary people extraordinary.” Joseph Bathanti explains: “Duncan soulfully choreographs the labyrinth of memory, how it stores and catalogs with regret and glory.” And Robert Inman declares: “The best thing about this beautiful work [All We Have Loved] is that it will touch your own mystic chords and bring your own past to vivid life.” To date, Julia has published ten books of prose and poetry, and she has a new essay collection All We Have Loved forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2023. A retired English and Humanities instructor who taught for over thirty years in the community college system, Julia is now a freelance magazine writer. Her essays appear frequently in Smoky Mountain Living Magazine and BoomerMagazine.com. She has also appeared in WNC Magazine, Blue Ridge Country, Good Old Days, History Magazine, World War One Illustrated, and many other regional and national magazines. She lives in her WNC hometown and enjoys spending time outdoors with her husband, Steve, a mountain woodcarver, and their daughter, Annie. When she is not writing and gardening, she plays classical piano and occasionally provides piano music for her church services.