Julie Babcock is a poet and fiction writer who teaches in an interdisciplinary writing program at University of Michigan. Her hybrid poetry collection, Rules for Rearrangement, won the 2019 Kithara Book Prize and was released November 2020. She is also the author of Autoplay, described as both an ode and an elegy to her Midwestern upbringing. Her poetry and fiction appear in PANK, Split Lip Magazine, december magazine, and has been anthologized in New Poetry from the Midwest.
She is a founding editor of the new journal Public School Poetry. and recently completed a novel tentatively titled The Wild Out, which began as a short story published in The Rumpus.
photo by David Ward
"All things break and fall against this life/and this life gathers the shards and makes song," Julie Babcock writes in this dazzling poetry/hybrid collection. Here, the gaps, ellipses, and erasures are like the clefts across which synapses fire. The cleft is between life and death, and the fire comes from Babcock's language and fearless structure. This book is a song, a fugue, a state of both being and becoming- and it will rearrange your mental furniture.
-Sue WIlliam Silverman, author of If the Girl Never Learns
Welcome to Ohio, populated by horses and astronauts, wolf moons and changelings. In Autoplay, the American Midwest buzzes with mystery, and our guide is a poet of deft lyricism and graceful wit. So let yourself go, dear reader, because, as Julie Babcock writes, "To dream is to let go," and these poems- full of heartache, wonder and awe- dream spectacularly.
- Matthew Olzmann, author of Mezzainines
The Wild Out
a novel manuscript by Julie Babcock
Escape plans and runaway schemes à la Huck Finn meet Danielle Evan’s The Office of Historical Corrections in The Wild Out.
It is 2019 Ohio, and exhausted social worker NINA’s sister has gone missing, leaving her young child in Nina’s care. The only clue to her sister’s whereabouts comes from a runaway named ELLE who is determined to forget her trauma and reinvent herself as a horse-owning pop star. When Elle’s older boyfriend, ROB, hatches a plan to start a family with her on a Civil War-era plantation in Georgia, Nina drops everything to follow them into the heart of the American South and into places she has always been careful not to go.
Narrated by all three characters—who attempt a range of wild identities in search of places past trauma—The Wild Out hovers in the space of what was, what is, and what might be.