Julie Sampson

Now working as independent researcher, Julie Sampson trained as musician/teacher and later achieved a PhD on the subject of the American writer, H.D., at the University of Exeter. She taught music, then creative writing, at various colleges in the Southwest; her last post was as visiting lecturer in English at the University of the West of England.

Julie has written since she was a child: her first tiny success was winning a children's short story competition set by a local rural group. More recently, her poems have had success in a variety of competitions and appeared in a number of magazines, anthologies and online. Her work was included in Making Worlds; One Hundred Contemporary Women Poets, 2003, eds. Myra Schneider, Dilys Wood and Gladys Mary Coles. In 1999 one of her poems was runner-up in the Exeter Poetry Prize. More recently her poetry has been ‘highly commended’ in the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize, in 2019 and her work received an 'honourable mention' in the Survision James Tate Memorial Prize, in 2021. Her poems also appear in Lockdown; Poems, Diary extracts and art from the 2020 pandemic; ed. Sue Sims, (Poetry Space, 2020).

Since retiring form teaching Julie's focused her research on women writers from the Southwest, especially from Devon; papers on the C16 Anne Dowriche have been published in Transactions of the Devonshire Association; an essay on H.D. in Devon appeared on the HD's Web newsletter; her edition of Lady Mary Chudleigh's Selected Poems was published by Shearsman, in 2009. Tessitura, a full length poetry collection was also published by Shearsman, in 2013. A chapbook/pamphlet, It Was When It Was When It Was, was published by Dempsey and Windle in 2018 and another full collection, Fivestones, came out with Lapwing Publications in 2022 (Not yet on Amazon Fivestones is available on Julie's author website. and there is a photo of the cover on her author page).

Julie spends any spare time researching and writing an occasional blog about the (mostly lost) history of Devon women writers. See https://newdevonbookfindsaway.blogspot.com/ Her author website is www.juliesampson.com