Julia Older (1942-2021) was a poet and an author. She published 11 books of poetry, four of which are book-length poems, and 14 books of fiction and nonfiction. Among Older’s many books are Tales of the François Vase and the mythical journey of Hermaphroditus in America, and Tahirih Unveiled, based on the life of Persia's first women's rights activist. Her poems, essays, translations, and stories have appeared in more than 200 publications. Older's other works appear in Poets & Writers, The New Yorker, Sisters of the Earth: Women Writing about Nature Entelechy International, Amazon Shorts, New Directions, and many other journals and anthologies. She was also an editor and book reviewer, translated two well-regarded collections of avant-garde French writer Boris Vian's stories, and was working on a translation of an Salvatore Quasimodo's poems when she died.
Older has received many awards and fellowships, including the Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan, the Mary Roberts Rinehard Grant for Prose, North Carolina First Poetry Book Grant, Independent Publisher Bronze Poetry Medal, First Daniel Varoujian Poetry Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Poetry Workshop, Yaddo, and MacDowell.
