Poet Julie Kane was born in Boston, Massachusetts but has lived in her adopted state of Louisiana for over thirty years now.  One of Anne Sexton’s graduate poetry students at Boston University at the time of Sexton’s suicide in 1974, Kane moved to Louisiana in 1976, after a marriage to a native of that state which later ended in divorce.  She lived in Baton Rouge for two years, working in the federal “War on Poverty”; then in New Orleans for seventeen years, working as a technical writer and editor; then in St. Gabriel for four years, completing a doctorate in English at Louisiana State University.  Since 1999 she has lived in Natchitoches, where she teaches at Northwestern State University.

      Kane published two poetry chapbooks in England and a first book of poems with a New Orleans regional press, but it was not until the publication of Rhythm & Booze in 2003 that her work came to national attention.  Rhythm & Booze was Maxine Kumin’s selection for the National Poetry Series, and it went on to become one of four finalists for the 2005 Poets’ Prize.  Kane’s third poetry collection, Jazz Funeral, is judge David Mason’s selection for the Donald Justice Poetry Prize; it will be forthcoming from Story Line Press in the spring of 2009.  Additional honors for her poetry include a Fulbright Scholarship, an Academy of American Poets Prize, the George Bennett Fellowship in Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy, two New Orleans Writer-in-Residence terms at Tulane University, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Poetry Award, the Open Poetry Sonnet Prize, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and first prize in the Mademoiselle Magazine College Poetry Competition.

      Like Everette Maddox and Yusef Komunyakaa, among others, Kane was one of the poets associated with the Maple Leaf Bar literary scene in New Orleans in the late 1970s and 1980s.  She is also considered to be a member of the New Formalist Movement in American poetry, although certain members of that group would object to her use of slant rhyme, roughened meter, and sometimes-raunchy subject matter.  Kane’s poems often center on themes of the breakdown of modern relationships or the intersection of identity and place, with the cold, unforgiving North of her Irish Catholic girlhood and the warm, sensual South of her adult years figuring as the two poles of fate vs. free will, inescapable tragedy vs. redemption through an act of grace.  Among the many anthologies featuring her poems are Poetry: A Pocket Anthology, edited by R. S. Gwynn; The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, edited by Daniel Tobin; I Never Promised You a Valentine: Poems for Young Feminists, edited by Carol Ann Duffy; The Book of Hopes and Dreams, edited by Dee Rimbaud; Kiss and Part: Laughing at the End of Romance & Other Entanglements, edited by Gail White; Call Down the Moon: Poems of Music, edited by Myra Cohn Livingston; Immortelles: Poems About Life and Death by New Southern Writers, edited by Thomas Bonner and Robert Skinner; and Uncommonplace: An Anthology of Contemporary Louisiana Poems, edited by Ann Dobie.

      Kane is also a nonfiction writer, editor, translator, and scholar.  The Vietnam memoir that she co-authored with Kiem Do, Counterpart, became a History Book Club featured alternate.  Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum, a collection of poems and essays about the late Everette Maddox that she co-edited with Grace Bauer, was one of three finalists for the 2007 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Book Award in Poetry.  Kane also edited the post-1900 poetry selections for the Longman anthology of Southern literature, Voices of the American South.  She has published poetry translations from the French of Victor Hugo and from the Lithuanian of Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė.  Her essays on poetry and literature appear or are forthcoming in Twentieth Century Literature, Literature Film Quarterly, Modern Language Quarterly, Journal of Consciousness Studies, PsyArt, Mezzo Cammin, Dictionary of Literary Biography, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary, Companion to Twentieth-Century British Poetry, Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences, and other journals and publications.  Her research interests include poetic form, neuroscience and poetry, and Louisiana writers.

      She is presently at work on her fourth collection of poems, a volume of light verse to be titled No-Win Situations.