Author Josepha Sherman (b.1946) died on August 23 following a year of deteriorating health.  Sherman began publishing in 1986 with a “Find Your Fate” adventure book and the novel Golden Girl and the Crystal of Doom.  Over the years, she published many science fiction and fantasy novels, often  using her training as a folklorist to create realistic, yet fantastic, backgrounds.  She wrote to Buffy, the Vampire Slayer novels with Laura Anne Gilman, collaborated with Mercedes Lackey on a Bardic Choices novel, and wrote many of her own original novels, including The Shining Falcon, for which she won the Compton Crook Award in 1990.  Her novels drew of a wide variety of sources, with Russian and Slavic legends in as much evidence as Celtic and Germanic folklore. In addition to her own novels, Sherman edited several anthologies of fantasy fiction, including the young adult book Orphans of the Night, Rachel the Clever: And Other Jewish Folktales, and Merlin’s Kin: World Tales of the Heroic Magician.  Sherman’s skills were not just in the realm of fiction and she published several non-fiction works, including Greasy, Grimy, Gopher Guts, with T.K.F. Weiskopf, which collected variations on children’s folksongs, and biographies of technical leaders including Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Jeff Bezos.