Books

Full Worm Moon

Winner, Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award

Honorable Mention, Book of the Year Award, Conference on Christianity & Literature

Includes Five Poems Nominated for the Pushcart Prize

Cascade Books
Amazon

“What if the beautiful day is over?” wonders Julie Moore in her shattering new collection. . . . And indeed, poems about the end of a marriage wring the reader. Cycling through a year’s full moons, these poems bear witness to ridicule, violence, and pitilessness. But wait–just as prayer can exorcise broken promises, so too can the natural world’s rising sap and irises mirror and enable human healing.

Anya Silver

Particular Scandals

Particular Scandals a Dayton, Ohio, Must-Read Book of 2014

Broad in scope—theological, ecological, and personal—and acutely particular in details—witnessed and lived—the affecting poems in Particular Scandals explore how one endures suffering, avoiding the clichés of both bitterness and transcendence.

Cascade Books
Amazon
Barnes & Noble

The world’s stubborn strangeness, its painful loveliness, and the search for traces of God amidst its people and creatures—Julie L. Moore braids all of these obsessions beautifully together into these luminous, resonant, unflinching poems, and somehow finds hope for this world among it all.

JEFF GUNDY

Slipping Out of Bloom

The quiet lyrics of Julie Moore’s Slipping Out of Bloom are infused with a sense of wonder at the world’s minute beauty, unfolding their observations and revelations, as their forms / like phantoms / blur between earth / and air.

WordTech Editions
Amazon

“What poetry can be made of [those] sufferings none of us want to live the first time around? Fine poetry, it turns out, that offers neither a romantic whitewash nor despairing doubt, but a series of beautiful particulars that offer clarity, beauty, and ‘amens’ in the midst of a world unlikely to change. Readers will be freshly charged to see joy in the scandal of living.”

Leslie Leyland Fields

Events

  • The Vincennes University Humanities Film and Lecture Series
    The Pursuit of Communion:
    One University Professor’s Journey in Polarized Times
    President’s Room in the Beckes Student Union
    Vincennes University
    Vincennes, IN
    February 13, 2024, 6:00-7:00 p.m.

    In our present, polarized time, many Americans seem to have forgotten that education is not meant for culture wars but rather for truth-telling, empathy-building, and citizen-flourishing. In an effort to reaffirm such beauty and goodness in American education, I will share my experiences teaching at an Historically Black College and University (HBCU) and predominantly white, religious universities, stressing the need for a pedagogy of communion in its most basic form–the interchange of thoughts and emotions, the act of holding in common that which we should value most: each other.

    Ofstad Visiting Scholar
    Truman State University
    Kirksville, MO
    February 26-March 8, 2024

    I will be doing a public reading and teaching a 2-week course called American Poetry of Protest at U.S. News & World Report’s #1 public school in the Midwest Region, Truman State. Here is the course description: In his famous essay “Why I Write,” George Orwell says, “I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books,” and in response, Natasha Trethewey says in her essay bearing the same title that her poetry has found “a sense of purpose in the beautiful idea of social justice for all human beings.” With this in mind, this creative writing course will focus on reading and writing poems about social justice. Students will read acclaimed and diverse American poets such as Trethewey, Claudia Rankine, Ada Limon, Joy Harjo, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, Kevin Young, Jericho Brown, Kazim Ali, Ross Gay, Maxine Kumin, Mary Oliver, W.S. Merwin, Julia Kasdorf, and others. Students will also read and discuss essays about the reasons for writing poetry and will write their own poetry manifesto expressing their views of the value, challenges, and pitfalls of political poetry. Likewise, students will write and workshop 2-3 original protest/political poems in response to the news of the day.

  • Book me to speak, do a poetry reading, and/or teach a master class in writing in-person or over Zoom through my contact page.



Writing

VERSE DAILY & POETRY DAILY FEATURES

  • “Bathing Beauties,” Web Weekly Feature, Verse Daily, October 17, 2022, from Quartet
  • “Four days after Mother’s Day,” Poem of the Day, Verse Daily, August 24, 2018 (from Full Worm Moon)
  • “Clifton Gorge,” Poem of the Day, Verse Daily, September 4, 2013 (from Particular Scandals)
  • “Clifton Gorge,” Poem of the Day, Poetry Daily, August 29, 2013
  • “Joy,” September 11, 2011 (from Slipping Out of Bloom)
  • *”The Painted Lady and the Thistle,” Web Weekly Feature, Verse Daily, May 2, 2011 (from Pirene’s Fountain and appears in Particular Scandals) *nominated for Best of the Net

OTHER FEATURES

  • “What to Lay Down,” SWWIM Every Day, February 17, 2022
  • “Ode to Katniss,” Autumn Sky Poetry (December 15, 2022)
  • “Recovery,” Poem of the Week, The Missouri Review Online (January 23, 2011)
  • Many poems featured on Your Daily Poem. The poems can be read in YDR archives
  • “Full Thunder Moon” featured on Image Journal‘s Good Letters Poetry Friday blog, with reflection written by poet Tania Runyan (my poem originally appeared in Issue 88 of Image)
  • “Moon When All Things Ripen,” Autumn Sky Poetry (August 26, 2021)

ANTIRACIST WRITING (BLACK LIVES MATTER!)

Poems

Essays

THE PROPHETESS POEMS

OTHER POEMS ONLINE

ONLINE REVIEWS OF MY BOOKS

INTERVIEWS ONLINE

BLOGS

WRITING CENTER PUBLICATIONS

Peer-Reviewed Article, “Designing Tutor Guides to Enhance Effectiveness Across Disciplines and with Special Demographics,” The Writing Lab Newsletter, December 2009/January 2010, with CU consultants Erin SanGregory and Sarah Matney and OSU Tutor Julie Morris. Accessible at https://wlnjournal.org/archives/v34/34.4-5.pdf and cited in Catherine Savini’s “An Alternative Approach to Bridging Disciplinary Divides,” The Writing Lab Newsletter, March/April 2011 at https://wlnjournal.org/archives/v35/35.7-8.pdf.

OTHER SITES OF INTEREST

WORKSHOPS & PRESSES

About

I grew up in Moorestown, New Jersey, and transformed from Jersey Girl to Heartland Lover when I came to college in rural, southwestern Ohio, in the early 1980s. After I earned my B.A. in English, I then earned my M.A. in English at the University of Dayton. I subsequently taught for ten years at our nation’s oldest, private, historically black liberal arts college (HBCU), Wilberforce University, an experience that had a profound influence on me. Over the next 23 years, as I then taught at two other religious, Midwestern universities, both of which were predominately white, I integrated antiracist pedagogies and curricula into my literature and writing courses as well as the Writing Centers I directed. I also began publishing poetry and essays.

Although I still live in Indiana, I now work remotely for Eastern University as a Senior Online Advisor and First Year Composition Instructor in its new LifeFlex program. In many ways, this next step in my career brings me full circle: I’m once again advising and teaching diverse adult learners, as I did when I worked for Wilberforce University’s CLIMB program, and I’ve returned to my Philly roots! Likewise, I have the opportunity to use all my scholarship about the intersections between Christian faith, antiracism, and linguistic justice in the courses I’ll be teaching.

But back to my writing life! I spent my childhood years filling spiral notebooks with poetry and stories. Despite feeling “called” to write, I became sidetracked by the world of academia and a genuine enjoyment for—as well as the work load required by—teaching. In my mid-thirties, however, I realized I might die without ever fulfilling my dream of writing a book.

Panic-driven and poetry-inspired, I began to read every contemporary poet I could get my hands on. And I kept reading. In 2005, I also participated in the Antioch Writers’ Workshop (AWW), which greatly expanded my creative thinking and writing skills. I’ve also participated in Image Journal‘s Glen Workshop many times, which was always an enriching experience for me. I consider every writer I read a mentor and the hours spent reading my life-long education.

Some of my work explores “place” in its broadest sense: Some poems revel in the wonder of creation or bemoan the damages it’s sustained, both here in the Midwest and across the globe. Yet much of my writing focuses on the place of faith amid great suffering by contemplating this question: How do I not wallow in my pain or seek to gloss over it with a glib transcendence but rather endure it, allowing it to do its exacting work on me? As part of such work, recently, I’ve been writing about biblical prophetesses and eunuchs, exploring their powerful voices and choices amid impossible situations. I’m also now writing poetry and creative nonfiction of witness. In so doing, I am not only reckoning with my own whiteness but also probing the devastating consequences of white supremacy in our nation’s history and contemporary manifestations, including in white evangelicalism–its churches, schools, and politics.

The poetic exploration of such themes yields an abundance of questions and discovery, including the need to confess our nation’s evils and establish a just society. These are the daunting themes my poetry addresses. And every time I begin to write a poem, intimidation sits on my shoulder, whispering in my ear, “Who do you think you are? This is beyond you. Don’t even try.”

But try, I do. And thankfully, my writing is receiving notice.

Contact

Invitations to read at your school, cafe, library, or festival are welcome!

I do readings in-person and online via Zoom. I also conduct workshops on poetry, essay writing (creative nonfiction), & antiracism.

You will find my third-person bio below that you can use to promote the event.

You can also contact me by using the form below.

You can also follow me on social media:

Third-Person BIO:

A Best of the Net and eight-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s 2018 Book of the Year Award. Her other books include Particular Scandals (Cascade Books, 2013), Slipping Out of Bloom (WordTech Editions, 2010), and the chapbook, Election Day (Finishing Line Press, 2006). Moore has won the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize from Ruminate Magazine, the Editor’s Choice Award from Writecorner Press, and the Rosine Offen Memorial Award from the Free Lunch Arts Alliance. Moore’s poetry has appeared in hundreds of journals such as African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, Missouri Review Online, New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, SWWIM, and Verse Daily. Likewise, her poetry has appeared in dozens of anthologies, including Becoming: What Makes a Woman, published by the University of Nebraska Gender Programs; Every River On Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio, published by Ohio University Press; How Higher Education Feels: Commentaries on Poems That Illuminate Emotions in Learning and Teaching, published by Oxford Learning Institute, University of Oxford, UK; Taking Root in the Heart: Thirty-Four Poets from the “Christian Century,” published by Paraclete Press; and the forthcoming Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, to be published by Penn State University Press. Moore’s creative nonfiction has also appeared in Relief Journal, Christianity Today, and Doubleback Review; her essay “Spiritus Mundi” likewise won the Donald Murray Prize from Writing on the Edge. After directing two university Writing Centers for 20 years, she now lives in Indiana and works at Eastern University for its LifeFlex program as a Senior Online Advisor and Instructor of First Year Composition. You can learn more about her writing at julielmoore.com.

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The amazing Alice Alexandra Moore! To hire her for your Web design, visit her contact page.

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