Appointed to a two-year term as Louisiana Poet Laureate in May 2011, Julie Kane is a native of Boston and a longtime resident of Louisiana. Her most recent poetry collection, JAZZ FUNERAL, won the 2009 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, judged by David Mason. RHYTHM & BOOZE was selected by Maxine Kumin as a National Poetry Series winner and was one of four finalists for the 2005 Poets' Prize. Kane is the co-editor, with Grace Bauer, of the anthology UMPTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A POSSUM: CRITICAL AND CREATIVE RESPONSES TO EVERETTE MADDOX (a finalist for the 2007 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Book Award in Poetry). She is also an associate editor of the Longman Southern literature anthology, VOICES OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH. The nonfiction Vietnam memoir that she co-authored with Kiem Do, COUNTERPART, was a 1999 History Book Club Featured Alternate. A former George Bennett Fellow in Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy, New Orleans Writer-in-Residence at Tulane University, and Fulbright Scholar at Vilnius Pedagogical University (Lithuania), she teaches creative writing and American poetry at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana.