About Julie Kane

Ms. Kane was born in Boston, Massachusetts but has lived in her adopted state of Louisiana for over thirty years now.  She was selected to be Louisiana's Poet Laureate in 2011. 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.  She lived in Baton Rouge, New Orleans,and St. Gabriel. Since 1999 she has lived in Natchitoches, where she teaches at Northwestern State University.

Her second book Rhythm & Booze (2003) 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 (2009), was judge David Mason’s selection for the Donald Justice Poetry Prize.  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.  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.

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

» Visit Julie's Website

Body and Soul (Pirogue Publishing, 1987)

Rhythm & Booze (University of Illinois Press, 2003)

Voices of the American South (Associate Editor—Pearson Longman, 2005)

Jazz Funeral (Storyline Press, 2009)