About Me

The first time Julia Gaskill ever competed with her poetry was in her college’s talent show back in 2011, where she performed a five minute long slam poem about her undying love of the Muppets. After taking first, she’s been chasing the dragon ever since.

Nowadays, Julia’s work focuses on her personal experience with womanhood - both the empowerment and the misogyny that comes with it - losing a parent at a young age, mental health, queerness, pop culture, life’s joys, and finding one’s voice. Oh, and dogs. Obviously dogs.

Since that first talent show, Julia has made a home for herself in the Portland poetry scene, particularly at the Portland Poetry Slam. She has gone on to compete on a national / regional scale with her poems. From 2016 through 2019, Julia competed in the Women of the World Poetry Slam, the Individual World Poetry Slam, the National Poetry Slam, the Utah Arts Festival, and the Bigfoot Poetry Festival. She placed in the top 30 poets at WoWPS in both 2016 and 2018, and her team made Finals Stage and took fourth at the Bigfoot Poetry Festival in 2023. She has performed on stages such as Pickathon, Treefort, Verses: Festival of Words, Voices of Today, the Lan Su Chinese Garden, and Concordia University.

Julia’s work has been featured in a fair share of online journals over the years (for a detailed list, visit her publications page). She released her debut collection of poetry, weirdo, in October 2022 through Game Over Books. She’s also included in present and forthcoming anthologies In Absentia (Bicycle Comics), Excelsior! (FreezeRay Poetry), and A Shape Produced by a Curve (great weather for MEDIA). Julia has authored four chapbooks and is the creator of the spoken word album, Stouthearted Bitch. In 2020, she collaborated with the band Impulse Control to write and record a coda for their track ‘Television’ on their album Thanks for Oversharing. Julia penned the poem ‘Always Choose the Prior’ for a video that was the winner of the "It's Your Town" Film Competition in 2015.

Julia is most proud these days to call herself a community organizer. She helped co-found the poetry open mic & poetry slam Slamlandia in 2016, and in 2018 she took on the role of leadership and has acted as the showrunner for the mic ever since. In 2019, Julia co-created the Bigfoot Poetry Festival, a three-day poetry event in Portland that invites teams from all over to compete, while also offering free open mics and workshops to the public. She has also been a help around Verselandia, Portland’s youth poet competition, in leading workshops, mentoring and coaching young writers, acting as a judge, and helping with time/score keeping at the Eastside Slams.

Outside of poetry, Julia Gaskill works as a dog walker / sitter and lives in Portland with her longtime partner and fellow poet, Stephen. She can often be found binging the latest appointment television, writing for the Muppet fan-site ToughPigs, eating soft cheeses, making unending to do lists, and complaining that after a decade people still don’t understand the ending of Lost.