Bio

julie cantrell

Julie Cantrell is a multiple award-winning, New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author, editor, creative writing instructor, TEDx speaker, and ghostwriter. She served as editor-in-chief of the Southern Literary Review and has received the Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, the Rivendell Writer’s Colony Mary Elizabeth Nelson Fellowship, the Fairhope Writers Residency, and the Pat Conroy Writer’s Residency Fellowship.

Her novels have earned starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal and have been featured in Top Reads lists by LitHub, Redbook, Southern Living Magazine, REAL SIMPLE, BookBub, HuffPost, USA TODAY (HEA), and more.

As a novelist, she’s received two Christy Awards, two Carol Awards, and the Mississippi Library Association Fiction Award. She was named a short-list finalist twice for the Mississippi Arts & Letters Fiction Award as well as a two-time short-list finalist for the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize.

In addition to her work with survivors of abuse and her service as a literacy advocate, she’s a member of the Tall Poppy Writers, an organization that promotes the power of story and elevates female voices.

She currently serves as the Managing Director of Story Summit, where writers of all levels and genres come together in community to elevate their craft and support one another’s creative works. She also teaches creative writing for Story Summit as well as for the Drexel University Low-Res MFA Program.

Prior to launching Life 2.0, she helped run her family’s small-scale sustainable farm, where she milked goats, raised sheep, boarded horses, gathered eggs, and harvested fresh honey, herbs, flowers, vegetables, and fruit. As a certified speech-language pathologist, she worked many years in the Mississippi public schools as an SLP, ELL teacher, and reading interventionist, and as a certified naturalist, she loves exploring every corner of this beautiful world.

With published works across a diverse range of genres and numerous languages, Julie currently writes, teaches, and edits fulltime from her home in Houston, Texas where she finds great pleasure in helping to shepherd other people’s stories to shelves.

What authors write stories similar to Julie’s?

Julie’s readers often enjoy works by Kristin Hannah, Karen Kingsbury, Francine Rivers, Lisa Wingate, Patti Callahan Henry, and Charles Martin. Like Julie, these authors write uplifting and emotionally impactful stories with rich settings and engaging characters.

Who are Julie’s favorite authors?

In addition to the authors noted above, some of Julie’s favorite authors include Barbara Kingsolver, Adriana Trigiani, Jesmyn Ward, Natasha Tretheway, Jamie Ford, Wally Lamb, Gail Tsukiyama, Malcom Gladwell, Jon Krakauer, Tara Westover, and Toni Morrison. Julie especially enjoys reading memoirs, bookclub fiction, literary fiction, southern fiction, and nonfiction.

Key Interviews and Presentations

Book Trailers

Into the Free

When Mountains Move

The 10 Minute Book Talk