Julie was born in the dead of a Minnesota winter to a mother who will never let her forget how wide her shoulders were on the way out. A storyteller from a young age, when she wasn’t asking her parents to write down tales of unicorns and little girls on adventures, she was coming up with ridiculous lies about her own life.

She’s been telling stories ever since. In her early teen years, she attended the Alpha Young Writers Program, and returned a decade later to serve as a staff member and help students find their legs the way other staffers once helped her. She studied writing and history at Ithaca College and is eying a history MA in pursuit of a PhD. She works full time as a personal assistant while steadily building her professional portfolio.

Her current writing credits include Tortall: A Spy’s Guide, which was released in October of 2017. Not only did she write large portions of the manuscript, but she coordinated four authors across the US and one living abroad in order to pull it all together.

She’s been editing, critiquing, and picking apart the way stories work for as long as she’s been writing them. From Aristotle’s Poetics to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, she’s obsessed with studying storytelling, its modes, its genres, and its formats. She’s parlayed this into editorial experience, critiquing first her peers and now her clients as a freelance developmental and copy editor.

Her hobbies include long walks through the library and overanalyzing superhero movies. One day she will stop going to school. Maybe. Probably.