Otherwise: Essays

＂I am a butterfly at half-mast. Muscles coiled like springs. I have not unwound yet,＂ writes Julie Marie Wade in Otherwise. In this series of intimate, braided essays written throughout her 30s, Wade traces her own unwinding and becoming through probing lyricism. As a daughter, lover, lesbian, and writer, she invites readers on a journey of self-discovery framed by memory, literature, and popular culture. Touching and tender, empathic and insightful, Otherwise revels in its author’s self-acceptance at the threshold of mid-life＂--

Julie Marie Wade was born in 1979 in Seattle, teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami, and lives in Dania Beach, Florida. She is the author of many books of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, including Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, Small Fires: Essays, Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems, When I Was Straight, Catechism: A Love Story, SIX: Poems, Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems, Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, and Skirted: Poems. With Denise Duhamel, she wrote The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, and with Brenda Miller, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices. Wade is a winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir.