Julie-ann currently works as a writer, teacher and editor. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and for three years was editorial assistant on the Irish Studies Review journal based at Bath. She later worked as a poetry tutor at Bristol University and now runs her own workshops
Her pamphlet collection, Convergence, published by Brodie Press won a Poetry Book Society Award. Her first full collection, Letters North, was nominated for the Michael Murphy Poetry Prize for Best First Collection in Britain and Ireland in 2011. Her collection, Voices in the Garden, a sequence about the life of Joan of Arc, was published by Lapwing Publications, Belfast in 2017.
Her latest collection, Inside Out, describes Julie-ann’s journey through Functional Neurological Disorder over the past few years. It was published by Turas Press, Dublin, in May 2023.
This follows her collection Exposure, which was published by Turas Press, Dublin, in September 2019. Exposure is centred on the islands of Orkney, their folklore, history, landscape and way of life.
The poem Fata Morgana from Exposure was Highly Commended in the Forward Prize for Poetry 2020.
Derryn Rees-Jones: ‘Rowell’s poems have an accomplished lyricism which subtly takes hold and refuses to let the reader go.’
Greta Stoddart: ‘Exposure is a very fine book, a dark hymn to the wonder and mystery of this most remote and fascinating of archipelagos.’
Martin Figura on Exposure: ‘Such is the psychological strength of these poems, they pitch us with them where ‘The hour is tawny at the heel of the hill’ and the ‘feral sea’ is after us.’
Jane Griffiths: ‘Letters North is a fine collection. Positioning the self in relation to place, and memory, Rowell presents a world where events and objects are both vividly realised in their own right and a means of connecting with others across time and space.’
Jeremy Hooker: ‘The unity of Rowell’s poems inheres partly in her Irish landscapes, and partly in the vivid sense impressions through which she renders them. These poems can help us to see things as if for the first time. They are also, often, uncomfortably perceptive, revealing the disparity between ideal vision and painful reality.’
