Julie’s Professional World
Julie is happiest immersed in words.
Her passion for words led her to a career as an English professor of over twenty years. In those years she taught Writing and Literature at Grand Rapids Community College, Kendall College of Art and Design/Ferris State University, Grand Valley State University, and Muskegon Community College. Her love of books and a family tree rich with teachers led her to know she wanted to teach English before she even began kindergarten. It was the perfect career choice, allowing her to encourage others to grow in their abilities in writing and appreciating literature.
Among her writing successes are a poem recently selected for publication in an anthology published in the UK, The Queen: Poetry Celebrating the Life of Queen Elizabeth II, which received a letter from Buckingham Palace on behalf of King Charles III. She is currently in talks with a publisher for her first full-length book in the creative nonfiction genre. For more than twenty years she was a contributing writer for Michigan BLUE magazine and Grand Rapids Magazine. She further worked as a free-lance writer and book reviewer for The Grand Rapids Press.
She sometimes works as an editor and/or book coach with select clients. Clients she has guided and edited for are now published writers of memoir, novella, and novels.
Julie holds a Master’s degree in Education with an emphasis on teaching English, a Bachelor’s degree with a major in English and a double minor of Writing and Communications. Her degrees were earned at Aquinas College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Julie’s Personal Life
Julie lives biking distance from the soul-nourishing Lake Michigan shore. She and her husband reside in a 130-year-old farmhouse on seventeen acres with woods and a pond. Julie spends her spring and summer months among her more than three hundred organically grown lavender plants and colorful flower gardens housing her antique and vintage concrete statuary. She spends her winter months writing, reading and wishing it were summer. For her, “home” means being with her husband in a place filled with dogs (she has a Boxer, Golden Retriever, and German Shepherd Dog), books, tea, and gardens.
Julie’s Literary Loves
Perusal of Julie’s bookshelves will reveal her love for the modernists, with novels and biographies on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Her own writing was influenced largely by Sylvia Plath, a brilliant writer of poetry and novel. Other favorites include poet Billy Collins, whom Julie studied under in a poetry writing workshop in Taos, New Mexico. Also dear to her literary heart are poets Ada Limon, Donald Hall, and Jack Ridl – with whom Julie has done one-to-one poetry workshops.
In 2022 she discovered novelist Matt Haig and poet-novelist Joy Harjo, both of whom became instant favorites.
Julie Bonner Williams 