Julia Bloch

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.