ABOUT

​Julie is a queer, disabled, neurodivergent author and award-winning poet.
​She is Co-Founder of Inklusion: A kickass guide to making literature events accessible to disabled people, and she is a trustee of Mslexia Magazine and a committee member of the UK Disability Network.

Julie is currently seeking representation across genres.

Poetry
Julie won the Aurora Prize for Writing in 2021 with her poem 'Ripples of Change', her poem  'Freedom' also placed on the shortlist.  She was a finalist in the Glasgow Women's Library Calm Slam 2020, as well as for the Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award 2020. She is currently working on her first pamphlet, exploring our relationship with nature and how it helps us to process our grief, loss, bewilderment and nostalgia in relation to family, identity and the planet.

Fiction
Her young-adult novel was shortlisted for the SCBWI Undiscovered Voices 2022 Anthology and was shortlisted for the Write Mentor Children's Novel Award 2021 and the Owned Voices Novel Award 2021. In 2020 it won a place on the Write Mentor Summer Mentoring Programme. 

Non-fiction
Julie was chosen to participate in the Diverse Critics Scheme delivered by Creative Scotland in partnership with Disability Arts Online and The Skinny in 2020. 

Her essays and features have been published in various publications including Disability Arts Online and Somewhere: For Us, and her poem, IMAGINE, was published in Not Going Back To Normal - A Disabled Artists Manifesto.

She is currently developing an outline for a memoir which explores the liminal spaces between able-bodied and disabled, familial and personal identity, and the fluidity of socio-economic status and how this intersects with the former. 

Consultancy 
Through her consultancy work, Julie has helped to improve access to development opportunities for disabled writers and raise awareness of the barriers to development. Clients include Edinburgh International Book Festival, Edinburgh City of Literature, Cymera Festival, Open Book, Paisley Book Festival, and the Scottish Book Trust.

Disability and diversity feature prominently in Julie's work and she is an advocate for diverse representation. Her background is in PR, marketing and events in publishing and she has also been a bookseller. She has an honors degree in Biomedical Science, and she recently studied screenwriting at Screen Academy Scotland.

Julie has chaired and spoken at events about diversity, feminism, identity, access and inclusion.