Julia Bouwsma
Julia Bouwsma is the sixth poet laureate of Maine. She follows Stuart Kestenbaum, Wesley McNair, Betsy Sholl, Baron Wormser, and Kate Barnes in the role.
Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, farmer, and small-town librarian. She is the author of two poetry collections: Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). She is the Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, Maine. She is the recipient of the 2019 and 2018 Maine Literary Awards for Poetry Book, the 2016-17 Poets Out Loud Prize, the 2015 Cider Press Review Book Award. She has received writing residencies from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Monson Arts, and Annex Arts in Castine. She contributes poems and book reviews to Cutthroat, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, River Styx, and other journals. Bouwsma, a former Managing Editor for Alice James Books, currently serves as an instructor at University of Maine at Farmington and on the Community Advisory Board for Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.
Write ME: An Epistolary Poetry Project
When was the last time you wrote someone a letter? Or received one? When was the last time you truly communicated with someone you didn’t already know?
Letters are a vital ritual of connection, a communication that extends beyond the words or message themselves to encompass an entire range of sensory experiences: the anticipation we feel as we open the mailbox and find an envelope, the sound of tearing paper as we slide a finger under the seal, the work of deciphering the familiar or unfamiliar handwriting, the color of the ink, the texture of the paper held in our hands as we read. The one who has written to us is absent and yet we can hold evidence of them in our hands. They are, in some way, here in the room with us by virtue of their letter.
An epistolary poem is a poem that is also a letter. The epistolary poem remains a powerful and captivating poetic form—and one that seems particularly crucial to our present moment, in which the intimacy, community-building, and grounding, physical aspects of letter writing can provide us with much-needed antidotes for social polarization and isolation.
To find out more about Write ME in 2024-25, please head over to the Write ME page.
