I wanted to build a boat and launch for Amsterdam.
Foxtrot on the upper deck in a moon-spangled frock.
I wanted to hold the sky like a bowl, smudge the clouds.
Bring a sentence to its knees.

from “When he said Sell a book, I heard Sail”

Julia Thacker’s debut collection To Wildness was chosen for the 19th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize by renowned poet Paul Muldoon. The book was also a finalist in the National Poetry Series.

In her enthusiastic endorsement, Joan Houlihan, author of It Isn’t a Ghost if It Lives in Your Chest, says, “A southern gothic atmosphere hovers here: shapes twisting in the dark and the language to conjure them near. What a rich and thrilling collection!” These poems have appeared in The New Republic, Poetry International, Bennington Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Gulf Coast. 

Julia received her undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa and her Master of Arts from Brown University where she studied with poet Michael S. Harper and novelist John Hawkes. Her graduate thesis was half poetry and half fiction. Her earliest poems appeared in Mademoiselle and Ms. Magazine and received the Grolier Poetry Prize. The granddaughter of a Harlan County, Kentucky coal miner, Julia also published a series of stories that plumb her family history and capture a vanishing Appalachian culture. One of them, “In Glory Land,” appeared in Antaeus and won a Pushcart Prize. Her novella, The Funeral of the Man Who Wasn’t Dead Yet, was published in AGNI and received their John Cheever Award for Fiction. 

Early in her teaching career, Julia traveled with the Artists Abroad Program to the UK where she presented a poetry seminar at Wroxton Abbey, a Jacobean house in Oxfordshire. Upon her return to the States, she was awarded a year-long fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute and subsequently taught fiction and memoir writing as a Lecturer at Tufts University and later in the Radcliffe Seminars. As a poet-in-residence in public schools, she also designed programs for elementary students which culminated in illustrated anthologies and public readings. Eventually, Julia founded a long-running series of salon-style workshops in her Cambridge living room where many talented writers found community. 

A fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown first brought Julia to Massachusetts. Over the years, her writing has been supported by fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as residencies at Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In 2024, she was an Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence at The Mount where she worked in Mrs. Wharton’s ornate boudoir - complete with fainting couch and literary ghosts. Julia currently lives outside of Boston with her husband Chris.