The Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University is thrilled to announce that poet Julian Brolaski will serve as the 2026 Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence this spring.
Julian Brolaski (it / xe / they), a poet and country musician and the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), and gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011). Julian plays with the band Juan & the Pines, and their first full-length solo album It’s Okay Honey came out in 2023. Julian was the 2023–2024 Bagley Wright lecturer, a 2021 Pew Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of the 2020 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. Its poems were recently included in Queer Nature (2022), When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020) and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat 2020). Julian is the co-editor of The Glittering Field: A Gathering of New Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Poetry with Crisosto Apache, forthcoming from Litmus Press in 2026.
This spring, Julian will teach Lyric Dialectics, a hybrid craft course that blends generative writing with a deep study of the lyric through the lens of universal poetics and generative metrics. The class will explore lyric poetry as a temporal art form and examine how deforming traditional structures can create more dissonant, idiosyncratic voices—drawing inspiration from contemporary poets and those Joy Harjo calls our “poetry ancestors,” including Kamau Brathwaite, Iliassa Sequin, Cedar Sigo, Sor Juana, and Wyatt.
Hollins MFA 