Julia Koets
Photo courtesy of Julia Koets
Bio
Julia Koets is the author of three books: The Rib Joint, a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist; PINE,a Florida Book Award winner; and Hold Like Owls, a South Carolina Poetry Book Award winner. Koets’ essays and poems have been published in literary journals including Creative Nonfiction, Indiana Review, Nimrod, the Los Angeles Review, Carolina Quarterly, and Portland Review. She earned her MFA at the University of South Carolina and her PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Cincinnati. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
It is an honor to be named a National Endowment of the Arts Fellow. This award allows me to spend more time writing and researching for my fourth book, a collection of essays tentatively titled Someone Will Remember Us. In these new essays, I weave research with personal narrative to explore queerness and loss, memory and the villanelle, and erasure and notions of the archive—what stories have been told and recorded in public memory, and what stories have remained secret. I’ve chosen to research a specific form of poetry, the villanelle, in this book because the villanelle is tied to the exploration and documentation of my own losses, and as poet and scholar Eavan Boland argues, “the formal properties of the villanelle address the idea of loss directly.” I am immensely grateful to the NEA and the panel of readers for this recognition and support of my work.