Journalism
Julia writes about Lazarus trees, humungous rocks, walking a beach (that spans three states), sharks, fake elephants, a farm in a mall, life in rural places, heroines, and little jars of dirt.
She’s also covered stories about food, fashion and folksy happenings.
A gung-ho interloper, she’s reported on Janeites, Dickinson marathoners, Canoeists, and Men who listen to heavy metals.
Thanks to a recurring “By The Numbers” assignment for Yankee, she’s a quasi-expert on Snowy Owls, Little Women, Dunkin Donuts and a dozen other topics.
For the past three years she’s offered an online class called (most recently) Seeding Your Sequoias: Writing Tiny But Mighty Prose with the Adirondack Center for Writing.
A sentence-ophile (lover of sentences?) she’s showcased favorites by John Cheever, David Sedaris, Leanne Shapton and William Goyen for Nieman Storyboard’s “One Great Sentence.”
For kicks, she created a poetry column (introducing poems of season and place by Vermont writers) for her local newspaper called “It could be verse”; also she founded a New Yorker fiction discussion group at her local library called, Talk of the Porch.
Her (mostly poetry) book reviews can be found in Seven Days, Orion and Northern Woodlands.
Her prose won the Ralph Nading Hill Award (now called the Vermont Writer Award). Her poetry won the Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize.
She’s received grants and fellowships from the Vermont Arts Council, the Vermont Community Fund, the Studios at Key West, The Frost Place, the Vermont Studio Center, the Center for Book Arts and the Cuttyhunk Island Writers Residency.
Her work has been a finalist the the Mura Award, the Curt Johnson Prose Award from December Magazine, the White Pine Press Award, Teachers and Writer’s Bechtel Award, Cogswell College’s Poetry Prize, the Vermont Book Award and (twice) for a Cities and Regional Magazine Association (CRMA) award.