about Julia
Julia Sorensen a published writer, musician, and visual artist from Treaty Six territory and based in Edinburgh. She was the second Poet Laureate of St Albert, Alberta. She has performed spoken word and music at events such as Edinburgh International Book Festival, Push the Boat Out: Edinburgh's International Poetry Festival, Edmonton Poetry Festival, Hidden Door Festival, SkirtsAFire, Seven Music Festival, and Amplify Festival. She co-hosts Push the Boat Out's monthly open mic, Rock the Boat. She has a Masters in Arts, Festival & Cultural Management from Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh and a Bachelor of Arts in English, Arts and Cultural Management, and German from the University of Alberta. She is an events manager with the British Council and freelance editor of successful creative funding applications and academic, poetry and prose publications.
Julia's current focus is interweaving comedy and satire into otherwise serious work. At Edinburgh's Hidden Door festival in June 2025, Julia performed a feature-length show entited "the many-faced artist as a young woman's portrait", a tragi-comic tapestry of roles a young femme artist takes on to develop her body of work. Watch the first poem here.
Julia has also developed projects integrating poetry and music. For Hidden Door in 2022, she performed a music / spoken word show, "a little bit of everybody", where she produced audio tracks to pair with poems.
In September 2022, Julia participated in the British Council's Venice Fellowship where she worked at the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and wrote poetry and music to respond to her experience. It can be accessed via Spotify here.
Julia has organised poetry events and run writing workshops in Scotland, Canada and Germany. She coached the Paul Kane Poetry Club in Canada from Fall 2017 to Spring 2020, providing weekly programming, poetry feedback, and mentorship to high school students. In 2019 the club competed in Can You Hear Me Now? in Calgary.
Julia has presented her academic research to the Technische Universität Dresden’s English and American Studies Department in May 2019, the University of Alberta’s EFSUN Symposium in April 2019, and the Interdisciplinary Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Undergraduate Conference in March 2018. She has also won multiple awards for her work including the Darren Zenko Memorial Prize in Creative Writing, the Sheila Watson BA Prize in Canadian or Post-Colonial Literature, the Meryle and Alder Clark Scholarship for English, and the S Bynchinsky Award for Creative Writing.
Image credit: Chiharu Shiota: Between Worlds exhibit in Istanbul Modern.
She placed third in the Edmonton Indie Slam Finals in January 2018 and was a finalist at the Edmonton Team Slam Finals in April 2017. Her own team also won Can You Hear Me Now? in Calgary in April 2016. Though her previous involvement with slam poetry informs her expressive performance style, her work maintains a softness and ambiguity which ultimately leaves it to the audience to make meaning.
Julia’s poetry and short fiction has been published in several anthologies and Glass Buffalo magazine. She has also self-published four chapbooks.