Julie Hensley

Julie Hensley is an Appalachian writer and core faculty member of the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University, where she teaches both poetry and fiction. She is the author of several books, including Viable: Poems, Landfall: A Ring of Stories, and Five Oaks. She has been awarded literary fellowships from Jentel Arts, Yaddo, Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, I-Park Arts, and the Tyrone Guthrie Center. You can find her most recent poems in The Southern Review, Good River Review, Rockvale Review, and Still.

Artist Statement

I write about the landscape and culture of rural spaces. The poems included in my writing sample are from Bent Cedar Mountain, a novel-in-poems chronicling the devolution of a marriage as a couple attempts to homestead together. This project draws heavily on the surprise I felt in discovering my oldest sister was in an abusive marriage. While heavily fictionalized, these narrative poems attempt to deconstruct and understand the violence my brother-in-law committed, as well as my sister’s shame and initial reluctance to leave the relationship.

My work explores the stories women don’t tell, as well the ones they do. I’m interested in the idea that we hand down secrets, generation to generation, without ever explicitly revealing them, that we essentially live around the previous generation’s secrets. Women, in particular, are implicitly charged with safeguarding such information, especially regarding issues such as (in)fertility, menses, childbirth, assault, and abuse.

My poems tell stories. I employ metaphor and imagery while actively seeking conversational diction. I want my poems to have a plain-speech, narrative feel, making the turns they ultimately achieve all the more startling.