Julie Choffel

Artist Statement

As a poet and educator, I focus on environmental engagement, community studies, and the intersections between creative labor and the politics of care. My poems often highlight the strange and profound nature of common experiences. Sometimes this means looking for wildness in the mundane. Sometimes it means creating a shortcut to wonder – using methods like collage and juxtaposition, pattern and interruption – to defamiliarize our routines and open them up to new possibilities. In this way my work is also ecological. Everything in the poem is in relationship to each other part, and each part is in relation to the world it came from. As an artist influenced by ecology and the natural sciences, I deeply value this relationship between familiarity and discovery.

Julie Choffel, Dear Wallace (The Backwaters Press, 2024).

Bio

Julie Choffel is a poet and educator. Born and raised in Austin, Texas, before moving to Massachusetts, California, and Connecticut, she studied geography at Texas State University and later graduated from the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst. Her most recent book, Dear Wallace, won the Backwaters Prize in Poetry and was published in 2024 from The Backwaters Press, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including New England Review, ORION, Conduit, New American Writing, Posit, Denver Quarterly, and the tiny. From 2017 to 2020, she served as the Poet Laureate of West Hartford, Connecticut, where she continues to curate readings and literary events for the Greater Hartford area. Julie teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut, and lives near Hartford with her partner and their three children.

https://www.juliechoffel.com/