Julie Ezelle-Patton

Julie Ezelle Patton is the author of The Flower Poem (Tender Buttons, 2024), Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2007), and “Car Tune” & Not So Bella Donna (Belladonna*, 2003). A 2024 special issue of Chicago Review is devoted to their poetic, performative, and visual work and building maintenance project. Patton’s work has been published in About Place Journal and the anthologies nocturnes, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (Henry Holt, 1994), Eco Language Reader (Nightboat Books, 2010), and Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-garde Poetry (The MIT Press, 2024). Patton has received a 2012 Doan Brook Association Watershed Hero Award, a Cleveland Arts Prize, a Museum of Fine Arts Houston Core Program Residency, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.

Patton’s multidisciplinary installation, Womb Room Tomb, interfaces with the visual art of Virgie Ezelle Patton (with Theresa Ramey) and was part of the 2018 FRONT Triennial. Patton also creates in-the-moment compositions with a typewriter and nonconventional instruments, and has performed at Arts for Art, the Stone, Artists Space, the Center for Book Arts in New York City, and other noted venues.

Once introduced by Harryette Mullen as “Truly Unruly Julie,” Patton has enjoyed collaborating with Daria Fain, Abou Farman, Janice Lowe, Sally Silvers, Bruce Andrews, Anne Waldman, drummer Nasheet Waits, and any newspaper Patton picks up on the way to a gig. An award-winning educator, Patton has taught her unique forms of “poethics” at New York University, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and Schule für Dichtung in Vienna, as well as in New York City schools and her own backyard, wherever that is. For Patton, this bio’s ideal form would be a picture of a circle.