Julia Johnson was born in New Orleans in 1971. She earned a BA from Hollins College and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow and studied under Rita Dove, Gregory Orr, and Charles Wright. She is the author of the poetry collections Subsidence (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2016), The Falling Horse (Factory Hollow Press, 2012), and Naming the Afternoon, (LSU Press, 2002), which won the Fellowship of Southern Writers George Garrett New Writing Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, Cincinnati Review, Poetry International, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Washington Square, and numerous other journals and anthologies. 

Johnson is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, where she founded and directed the MFA in Creative Writing Program. Prior to joining the faculty at Kentucky, she taught at Hollins University, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.