Julia Bloch

Julia Bloch (MFA, PhD) is Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of three books of poetry, has received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by Affiliated Faculty, and has been awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Her current scholarly book in progress investigates generic concordance and contention in the innovative North American long poem, looking at issues of race, gender, ideology, and the place of the lyric in subject formation. A second scholarly book project draws on queer theory to argue that performative and procedural poetry stages an argument about reproductive time.

Julia Bloch received a BA in political philosophy at Carleton College, an MFA in creative writing/poetry at Mills College, and an MA and PhD in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her interests in twentieth-century poetry and poetics include the modern and contemporary long poem; formal hybridity; subjectivity; race, gender, and sexuality; and genre theory, with a particular interest in lyric theory. Her book Lyric Trade: Reading the Subject in the Postwar Long Poem published by University of Iowa Press in 2024, is a study of lyric, race, gender, and the post-1945 long poem. Julia’s poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in Journal of Modern Literature, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Women’s Studies Quarterly, How2, Mirage/Period(ical), Aufgabe, Five Fingers Review, New Review of Literature, and elsewhere. She is the author of three books of poetry: Letters to Kelly Clarkson, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; Valley Fever; and The Sacramento of Desire. Chapbooks include Hollywood Forever (Little Red Leaves Textile Series) and Like Fur (Essay Press). For many years she was editor of the international poetics journal Jacket2 and continues there as contributing editor; she has also served as an associate at the Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking. She previously served as assistant professor of literature at the Bard College MAT Program in Delano, California, and as associate director of the Kelly Writers House. She now directs the Creative Writing Program at Penn. She has received the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching by Affiliated Faculty and has also been awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.