Julie Batten was born in British Columbia, Canada to English immigrant parents. When she was six months old, having had enough of the snow, her parents high-tailed it back to the Queen’s Country. Julie spent her early childhood in Taunton, Somerset, England, a.k.a. "Camelot country," where fermenting apples into cider is a way of life. By the time she was five, Julie was living in Hopewell, New Jersey with her wanderlust parents. The British accent she must have had at the time prevented her from ever developing a New Joysey accent, despite spending the next 12 years of her life there falling in love with the funk that reigned supreme within a hundred mile radius of Philadelphia.
Having won some local awards for her art in high school, Julie attended Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where she turned her creative abilities to theater and writing. Onstage, Julie defied type casting by performing roles as diverse as the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist, Catherine in Pippin, and Maggie in After the Fall.
Upon graduation from Mount Holyoke, Julie won awards for her fiction and went to New York to work for SELF Magazine, a Conde Nast publication. Julie is a multi-genre artist and writer; in the past twenty years, her diverse talent has allowed her to do everything from writing the first girls’ software game in the '90s to enrolling at Bennington Writing Seminars to earn her MFA in writing and literature. Her lifelong love of the visual arts has currently transformed itself into portrait making and children’s book illustration. She is presently completing work on a book of poetry and a children’s book.
