Julie Marie Wade
Julie Marie Wade is the author of 22 volumes of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, including the new memoir Other People's Mothers (University Press of Florida, 2025). Other recent work includes Quick Change Artist: Poems (Anhinga Press, 2025), selected by Octavio Quintanilla as the winner of the 2023 Anhinga Prize in Poetry, The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Small Harbor Editions, 2025), co-authored with Denise Duhamel, Fisk, By Analogy (CutBank Prose Chapbook Series, 2025), and the nonfiction novella, The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024), selected by Michael Martone as the winner of the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. A finalist for the National Poetry Series and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Florida International University in Miami.
When I Was Straight
"Delightful, heartbreaking, magic and real stories with a multitude of prepositions to guide us: a gifted young poet’s coming to, coming out, coming jubilantly back into self."
— Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton
New in September 2025!
Other People’s Mothers is a collection of interconnected, autobiographical essays that explore the relationship between a daughter, her mother, and the other mothers present in their lives. In this coming-of-age memoir, Julie Marie Wade traces a nexus of female influences on her formative years in the ’80s and ’90s. Through words and actions, the women around her communicate powerful and often contradictory messages about class, religion, education, and morality, holding enormous power over Wade’s journey toward adulthood.
In expanding her exploration of motherhood and daughterhood to include these “other mothers,” Wade takes a new and surprising kaleidoscopic approach to her portrayals of family life. This book reveals a young woman in the late twentieth century grappling with gendered expectations, beauty and body ideals, and complex messages about who she is permitted—or destined—to become.