Exploring the hazy line that can exist between friendship and desire, this memoir-in-essays is a coming out story that chronicles the childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood of Julia Koets, who grows up entrenched in religion in a small town in the South.

Julia Koets’s poetry collection, Hold Like Owls (University of South Carolina Press), won the 2011 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, judged by National Book Award Winner Nikky Finney, and her memoir-in-essays, The Rib Joint (Red Hen Press), won the 2017 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Book Award judged by Mark Doty. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Creative Nonfiction, and the Los Angeles Review. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of South Carolina and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. She currently teaches at Clemson University.

https://www.juliakoets.com/