Julia Bloch

Photo of Julia Bloch by Ryan Collerd.

Director, Creative Writing Program

Website

Julia Bloch received a BA in political philosophy at Carleton College, an MFA in creative writing/poetry at Mills College, and an MA and PhD in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of three books of poetry: Letters to Kelly Clarkson, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; Valley Fever; and The Sacramento of Desire. Julia’s poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Journal of Modern Literature, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Women’s Studies Quarterly, How2, Mirage/Period(ical), Aufgabe, Five Fingers Review, New Review of Literature, and elsewhere; her poetry chapbooks include Hollywood Forever (Little Red Leaves Textile Series) and Like Fur (Essay Press). She has been awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and is coeditor of the international poetics journal Jacket2. She previously worked as assistant professor of literature at the Bard College MAT Program and as associate director of the Kelly Writers House before joining the Creative Writing Program at Penn, where she has received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by Affiliated Faculty.

Julia’s scholarship combines poetics with studies in race, gender, and sexuality to show how poetic forms can dislodge received notions of identity and sociality and imagine new forms of being. Her book Lyric Trade, published in 2024 by University of Iowa Press, is on lyric, race, and gender in the long poem. Another scholarly book project in progress draws on queer theory to argue that performative and procedural poetry stages an argument about reproductive time.

Julia teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in poetry and poetics, literary studies, and a number of creative writing topics, including poetry, fiction, memoir, journalism, and editing. Since 2015 Julia has served as director of the Creative Writing Program.

Photo by Ryan Collerd.

Office Hours
By appointment, Monday through Thursday
Courses Taught

ENGL 010.601 Introduction to Creative Writing: Fiction and Poetry
ENGL 010.303 Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry and Memoir
ENGL 010.304 Introduction to New Media
ENGL 113.301 Poetry Writing Workshop
ENGL 126.301 Art of Editing
ENGL 435.640 Writing Through Music
ENGL 3426.301 The Art of Editing

 

The Boundaries of Form in Fiction and Poetry

Kelly Writers House Fellows Seminar

Writing Philadelphia

Poetics: Lyric Theory

Turning on the Word: Post-1960 US Literature

Mashups and Remixes

Word on Fire: Gender, Sexuality, Lyric

Affiliations