Julia Bloch is a poet, scholar, editor, and teacher whose work explores queer desire, California landscapes, lyric subjectivity, popular culture, reproductive time, and contemporary poetics. She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the faculty of Penn LPS Online.
Her poetry books are Letters to Kelly Clarkson, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; Valley Fever; and The Sacramento of Desire, all published by Sidebrow Books. Her scholarly book Lyric Trade: Reading the Subject in the Postwar Long Poem was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2024.
Julia Bloch in Shampoo
Shampoo Issue 25 published Bloch under the entry from Letters to Kelly Clarkson. The appearance preserves material from the project that later became her first full-length poetry collection.
This publication places Bloch within Shampoo’s archive of contemporary poets and connects the magazine with a body of experimental poetry shaped by serial form, popular culture, lyric address, and queer subjectivity.
Letters to Kelly Clarkson
Letters to Kelly Clarkson uses the structure of address to move through celebrity, longing, mediated intimacy, consumer culture, music, and the fractured experience of speaking toward a public figure who is also an image produced by mass culture.
The Shampoo appearance gives an early view of the project’s mixture of lyric intimacy and cultural critique. The letter form allows private feeling, quotation, media language, and public spectacle to remain in tension.
California and Valley Fever
Bloch grew up in northern California and Sydney, Australia, and California remains central to her poetic geography. Valley Fever turns landscape, illness, environmental pressure, desire, and altered syntax into a densely layered account of place.
Her 2020 book The Sacramento of Desire extends that California trilogy through queer family-making, reproductive medicine, grief, futurity, and the political meanings carried by bodies and environments.
Scholarship and poetics
Bloch’s scholarship focuses on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, gender, race, subjectivity, the long poem, and lyric theory. She has also worked as an editor of Jacket2, linking her creative practice with sustained critical engagement in contemporary poetry.
This combined work gives Bloch a distinctive place within contemporary American poetry, where creative writing, scholarship, editing, and literary community continually inform one another.
Further reading
Julia Bloch’s official site documents her books and current projects. The University of Pennsylvania provides her current academic profile, and the Academy of American Poets offers a biographical note and selected work.