“Julie Kane is a poet I will never tire of reading. Her technical mastery never gets in the way of her ‘reports on being’ that are by turns poignant, funny, moving, and disarmingly beautiful,” says Darrell Bourque, 2009-2011 Louisiana Poet Laureate, 2014 Louisiana Writer Award recipient, and 2019 Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Humanist of the Year. “In every poem the sly angel of a poet she is reveals itself and invites us into a world filled with light and gravity, inquiry and empathy, thought and compassion.” 

Alison Pelegrin, 2023-25 Poet Laureate, responded to the news with "I am thrilled to see Julie Kane recognized as the 2025 Louisiana Writer Award recipient, though she has always been a major writer to me. The footprints of Julie Kane’s influence march through every stage of my life as a poet--the villanelles, the bartender poems, the strong women, the nasty women, the bravery and wit. Her latest, Naked Ladies, is a mic drop of a book that proves the extent of her powers, and I can think of no one more deserving of this honor."  

A native of Boston, Kane moved to Louisiana nearly half a century ago. She has since made her home in five different Louisiana parishes—East Baton Rouge, Jefferson, Orleans, Iberville, and Natchitoches—and served as Louisiana Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2013. Her poems frequently reflect the landscapes, characters, and culture of her adopted state. Writing about Kane for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, critic Mary McKay said, “To read her poetry is to live briefly in New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana—to feel the heat, the air, the water, the fire, the life here.” 

As a Cornell University undergraduate, Kane won first prize in the Mademoiselle Magazine College Poetry Competition, judged by Anne Sexton and James Merrill. She went on to earn a master’s degree in creative writing from Boston University, where she was Sexton’s student at the time of her death. The following year, Kane became the first woman to hold the George Bennett Fellowship in Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. That was followed by the move to Louisiana, where she was to earn a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University—winning its Lewis P. Simpson Dissertation Award and its Academy of American Poets Prize, judged by Louise Glück—and become a college professor herself. In 1995 and again in 1999 she served as New Orleans Writer-in-Residence at Tulane University. In 2016 Kane retired as Professor Emerita of English from Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, having won NSU’s Excellence in Teaching Award, Mildred Hart Bailey Faculty Research Award, and Dr. Jean D’Amato Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award. During her time at NSU, Kane was also awarded a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to teach for a semester at Vilnius Pedagogical University in Lithuania. 

Kane’s first full-length poetry collection, Body and Soul (1987), came out from Pirogue Publishing, a small Louisiana press founded by Maple Leaf Bar (New Orleans) owner Hank Staples and the late Bill Roberts. Her publisher’s attempts to sell copies from behind the bar were quickly thwarted by the beer spilled on them. But her second book, Rhythm & Booze (2003), won the National Poetry Series, judged by Maxine Kumin, bringing Kane to national attention. Kane’s next book, Jazz Funeral (2009), won the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, judged by David Mason. It was followed by Paper Bullets (2014), a lighthearted collection of humorous poems. With Mothers of Ireland (2020), Kane returned to her Boston Irish-American roots and to the stories of her women ancestors’ lives of trauma and resilience. That book won the Poetry by the Sea Book Award and was a longlist finalist for the Julie Suk Prize. Released in spring 2025 from LSU Press, Naked Ladies: New and Selected Poems gathers selections from her five previous books together with a generous sampling of new poems. 

Along the way, Kane also had two poetry chapbooks published overseas, in London: Two into One (1982) and The Bartender Poems (1991). Playwright Harold Pinter was the funding source behind Greville Press, publisher of The Bartender Poems, and Pinter himself introduced Kane at the launch reading for her chapbook held in London’s Southbank Centre—a Cinderella evening. 

As a nonfiction writer, Kane co-authored the memoirs of Kiem Do, a South Vietnamese Naval Captain who settled in Gretna, Louisiana, with his family following the Fall of Saigon. Counterpart: A South Vietnamese Naval Officer’s War (1998) became a History Book Club Featured Alternate Selection in spring 1999. Robert Olen Butler, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of short stories about Vietnam War refugees in Louisiana, wrote, “As well written and detailed as most novels, Counterpart gives a fascinating view of the Vietnam War from a drastically under-represented point of view—the Vietnamese. This is an important—even indispensable—book.” 

Kane’s contributions to literature include co-editing several books, including Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: Critical and Creative Responses to Everette Maddox, from Xavier Review Press (2006). Maddox was a gifted poet and legendary New Orleans character who died young. The anthology of poems, stories, and essays about him became a finalist for the 2007 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) poetry book prize. With Grace Bauer, Kane co-edited Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (2017); and with H. L. Hix, she co-edited Terribly in Love (2018), selected poems in English translation by the Lithuanian poet Tautvyda Marcinkevičiütė. Kane was also associate editor for twentieth-century poetry of the Pearson/Longman Southern literature textbook Voices of the American South (2005). 

Kane’s poems have been set to music by composers Libby Larsen, Dale Trumbore, and Kenneth Olson and have been sung and/or recorded by performers including opera stars Susanne Mentzer and Jamie Barton and The American Boychoir. Most recently “The Sallow Harp,” with lyrics by Kane and music by Trumbore, was premiered by the Macalester College Chorale in St. Paul, Minnesota. Kane and Trumbore previously collaborated on the one-act opera Starship Paradise, which had its premiere at Center City Opera Theater of Philadelphia. 

Poet Dave Smith, Editor of the Southern Messenger Poets series at LSU Press which published Kane’s last two poetry collections, had this to say about her Louisiana Writer Award:  

Julie Kane is a quirky, independent, sassy, and always provocative poet. She is also an exquisite, demanding craft master, a student of verse history, a practitioner of traditions that have enabled personal stories to speak credibly over all borders of time and place and gender. These particular stories are the daunting ones of family promises and despairs and failures, of love that couldn’t be sustained but can’t be forgotten or even distanced, of the little nicks of the knife that turn out to be murderous to the soul. That’s a hell of a lot to ask of a single writer but Ms. Kane is the kind of person who welcomes and profits from a good challenge. I think what makes her special, and welcome, is a wicked sense of humor and a braided intelligence whose continual function is to say, hey, listen man, and as it may be--you got to lighten up! Her poems are like elegant hands at our cheeks, sometimes consoling, sometimes slapping, sometimes embracing us. Naked Ladies: New and Selected Poems is a waltz of exposures and triumphant recoveries you don’t have to be a poet to enjoy, you just have to have been alive enough to want the dodgy party life can be, a fine soiree Julie Kane cues up page after page. 

Since her retirement from NSU, Kane has taught part time in the low-residency poetry MFA program at Western Colorado University. The chiefly online position allows her to continue residing in her beloved Louisiana while spending two weeks each summer in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. She is currently working on a collection of memoir essays about interesting characters she has known.