Julie E. Bloemeke is a native of Toledo, Ohio. She received an MFA through the Bennington Writing Seminars, and an MA from the University of South Carolina, where she was chosen as a Ramsaur Fellow and studied with James Dickey. Currently in Atlanta, Georgia, she has served as a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has also been in residency at the Bowers House Literary Center. Her poems have been widely anthologized and appeared in numerous literary journals including Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Palooka Magazine, South Dakota Review, The Cortland Review, Bridge Eight Literary Magazine, and others. Her ekphrastic work has been published and showcased in collaborations with the Toledo Museum of Art and Phoenix Museum of Art. A freelance writer, editor, and guest lecturer, her interviews have recently appeared in The AWP Writer's Chronicle and in Poetry International. Slide to Unlock was a finalist and semi-finalist for multiple book prizes including the May Swenson Poetry Prize in 2016. Slide to Unlock is her first full-length poetry collection.

Other poems by Julie E. Bloemeke in Verse Daily:
February 18 2016:   "Observations from The Base" "The problem with heights..."

Books by Julie E. Bloemeke:

Other poems on the web by Julie E. Bloemeke:
Two poems
Five poems
Two poems
Three poems

Julie E. Bloemeke's Website.

Julie E. Bloemeke on Twitter.

About Slide to Unlock:

"Is it possible for a lyric poet to bring the rawest complications of the adult heart, an orchestra-conductor's authority of syntax, a pristinely liberating imagination, and a virtual mixtape's range of voices, reference, and places together into a single, unified, seemingly narrative, utterly dazzling whole? Julie E. Bloemeke's Slide to Unlock confirms: it is."
—Jane Hirshfield

"Julie E. Bloemeke's Slide to Unlock is a kind of philosophical love poetry, and in it, the poet locates in the body the satisfactions of the mind: 'There is no place but here, / submerged, the flower of me, / the flower of you, both coded to open, / but brought instead to salt, / converted to everlasting.' Lines like these spiral and unwind in Bloemeke's opus. This is a lovely book."
—Jericho Brown