Julie Kane (born July 20, 1952 in Boston) is a contemporary American poet, scholar, and editor and was the Louisiana Poet Laureate for the 2011–2013 term.[1][2]
Although born in Massachusetts, Kane has lived in Louisiana for over three decades and writes about the region with the doubled consciousness of a non-native.
Her work shows the influence of the Confessional poets; indeed, she was a student in Anne Sexton's graduate poetry seminar at Boston University at the time of Sexton's suicide.
She is also associated with the New Formalist movement in contemporary poetry, although she has published free verse as well as formal verse. Her formal poems tend to bend the "rules" of poetic forms and employ slant rhyme.
In 1976, Kane moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she began to incorporate her impressions of the unique landscape and culture of the area into her poetry. Taking a job as a technical writer in New Orleans, she became associated with poets who frequented the weekly literary readings held at the Maple Leaf Bar—including Yusef Komunyakaa, Grace Bauer, and Everette Maddox. In 1982, British poet Geoffrey Godbert's Only Poetry Press published a two-woman collection of Kane's and Ruth Adatia's poems, titled Two Into One. In 1987, Kane's first full-length poetry collection, Body and Soul, came out from Pirogue Publishing. In 1991, Greville Press published her chapbook, The Bartender Poems, and she was introduced by Harold Pinter at the Southbank Centre in London.
Her work has appeared in The Formalist, The Southern Review, London Magazine, Feminist Studies, Modern Language Quarterly, Twentieth Century Literature, Literature/Film Quarterly, Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Suzanne Disheroon-Green; Lisa Abney; Philip Dubuisson Castille; Barbara C. Ewell; Sarah Gardner; Joe Marshall Hardin; Julie Kane; Pamela Glenn Menke, eds. (2004). Voices of the American South. Pearson/Longman. ISBN978-0-321-09416-2.
Grace Bauer; Julie Kane, eds. (2006). Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: Critical and Creative Responses to Everette Maddox. Xavier Review Press. ISBN978-1-883275-16-7.
Carol Ann Duffy, ed. (1997). "Thirteen". I wouldn't thank you for a valentine: poems for young feminists. Illustrator Trisha Rafferty. Macmillan. ISBN978-0-8050-5545-0.
^"Louisiana". The Library of Congress. The Library of Congress. Retrieved 30 July 2022.
^Julie Kane, Poets At Work, backed up by the Internet Archive as of April 26, 2012. Accessed August 6, 2019. "Education:... Montclair (NJ) High School, 1970"