Julie Sophia Paegle
Julie Sophia Paegle lives in the San Bernardino Mountains with her husband, Stephen Lehigh, and their sons, Connor and Quinn. She teaches at California State University, San Bernardino, where she is Poetry Coordinator for the M.F.A. program. She was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and spent time, growing up, in Argentina, where her mother was born; she has also returned to Latvia, her father’s birthplace. More recently, she divided her time between Alaska and Utah, where she earned undergraduate degrees in Environmental Earth Science and English. She holds an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah.
She taught as a poet in the schools and for the University of Alaska Fairbanks’s Upward Bound program, served as poetry editor for Quarterly West, and worked as a dog-handler and a wrangler in Alaska. Her prize-winning poetry has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies. Recent projects include a book-length poem, Twelve Clocks, which attends to loss (from the death of Astyanax to global cycles of mass extinction) by juxtaposing such measures of time as geochronology and mass spectrometry with the traditional epic topos of poetic immortality, and How We Die in the North, a memoir that alternates between verse and prose pages to explore the rich array of local myths, legends, and events of the Murphy Dome region north of Fairbanks, Alaska. Her most recent poems are obsessed with the southern California mountains and deserts—their ecosystems, species, droughts and fires.
Selected Work
