by Julie Marie Wade (Author)
Otherwise, the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, is a personal lyrical essay collection by Lambda Literary Award Winner, Julie Marie Wade.
In this series of intimate, braided essays written throughout her 30s, Wade traces her own unwinding and becoming through probing lyricism: "I am a butterfly at half-mast. Muscles coiled like springs. I have not unwound yet." As a daughter, lover, lesbian, and writer, she invites readers on a journey of self-discovery framed by memory, literature, and popular culture. Touching and tender, empathic and insightful, Otherwise revels in its author's self-acceptance at the threshold of mid-life.
Author Biography
Born in Seattle in 1979, Julie Marie Wade earned a Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University in 2003, a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh in 2006, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities at the University of Louisville in 2012. She is the author of many books of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, including Otherwise, Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, Small Fires: Essays, When I Was Straight, Catechism: A Love Story, Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems, Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, and Skirted: Poems. With Denise Duhamel, she wrote The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, and with Brenda Miller, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, and a recipient of grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami. She makes her home with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats in Dania Beach.