Julie Kane

Poet Julie Kane—the great-grandchild of eight Irish immigrants—was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She grew up in Massachusetts, upstate New York, and New Jersey, and graduated from Cornell University with a B.A. in English. One of Anne Sexton’s graduate poetry students at Boston University at the time of Sexton’s suicide, Kane moved to Louisiana after marrying a native, then stayed after the marriage ended. 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 with a dissertation on the villanelle at Louisiana State University. Since 1999 she has lived in Natchitoches, where she is a Professor of English at Northwestern State University and winner of the 2014 Excellence in Teaching Award. She was the 2011-2013 Louisiana Poet Laureate.