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Winner, 2021 Housatonic Book Award
Finalist for the Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
You have a history, and a body. You are a history, and a body. Your body has (is) a history, too. As a girl, Julie Marie Wade was uninterested in makeup, boy-watching, and other trappings of conventional girlhood, much to her mother's disappointment. Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe-movie stars immortalized as feminine ideals, even as they both died tragically and young-were lodestars that threw Wade's own definition of beauty into relief as she stumbled into adulthood.
Now, in Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, Wade traces the intimate story of coming of age in one particular body (as a lesbian, an only child, a Protestant attending Catholic school). She uses the language and tenets of music, math, religion, fairy tales, poetry, and art to reckon with the many facets of embodiment, sexuality, and love in our contemporary world. The diet industry, popular culture, and her own family all provide rich material for what is ultimately a lyrical and unflinching investigation into the questions that prickle deep within the human heart.
About the author
Born in Seattle in 1979, Julie Marie Wade completed a Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University, a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities with a creative nonfiction dissertation at the University of Louisville. She has published an assortment of collections of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, most recently Skirted: Poems (The Word Works, 2021) and Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing (The Ohio State University Press, 2020). With Denise Duhamel, she wrote The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019) and with Brenda Miller, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices (Cleveland State University Press, 2021, selected by Hanif Abdurraqib as the winner of the Cleveland State University Press Nonfiction Book Award. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami.
