Julia Johnson, a native of New Orleans, was a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, where she took her MFA in 1995. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Third Coast, Poetry International, 64, and New Orleans Review. Her first book of poems, Naming the Afternoon, was published by the Louisiana State University Press in 2002. She has been awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize three times and is the winner of the Fellowship of Southern Writers' 2003 New Writing Award. She is currently an assistant professor at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.  

Photo by Bob Holub