Julia Bloch
Director, Creative Writing Program
(she/her/hers)
Office Hours
By appointment
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 North American long poem; formal hybridity; subjectivity; race, gender, and sexuality; and genre theory, with a particular interest in lyric theory and studies. Her current critical monograph in progress investigates generic concordance and contention in the innovative North American long poem, looking at issues of gender, ideology, and the place of the lyric. 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 2013 Lambda Literary Award; Valley Fever, published in 2015; and The Sacramento of Desire, forthcoming in 2020. Her several chapbooks include Hollywood Forever (Little Red Leaves Textile Series) and Like Fur (Essay Press). She is coeditor of the international poetics journal Jacket2 and an associate at the Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking. From 2011 to 2013 she served as assistant professor of literature at the Bard College MAT Program in Delano, California. From 2013 to 2015 she was 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.