Julie Zhou (She/Her)

NYLONSADDLE Photography

Julie Zhou was born in Madison, WI, and despite summers in Shanghai and a fleeting love affair with New England, she has always found her way back to the Midwest. These days, she lives with a household of chosen family in Minnesota, where she serves as a freelance writer for organizations working towards gender justice, food sovereignty, prison abolition, and the many intersections of those movements. She cultivates plants poorly, recipes well, anxieties often, and social media not at all.

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Communities: LGBTQ+, Asian American

Book:

Old Wives' Tales

Fiction / Literature
Cardinal
March 2027
ISBN 9781538780633
Paperback, 0 pages

In this brilliant sliding doors debut, a Chinese American couple's love story is told and retold Elizabeth and Simon are newly married. Elizabeth is waiting for her green card and spends the winter in Chicago staining her fingers with pomegranate seeds, dreaming of home. Elizabeth and Simon can’t get pregnant, and something unseen is leaving bruises on Elizabeth’s body as she sleeps, making rest impossible. Elizabeth and Simon are having a new baby, and as they convert a closet into a nursery, Elizabeth is cursed with a magical second sight. In these ten linked stories, echoing oral traditions from around the world, Julie Zhou re-spins old wives’ tales: from Chinese folklore to nursery rhymes, from the myth of Persephone to “The Princess and the Pea.” The result is an astonishing feat of storytelling that reimagines fairy tale and reality, making both come to exuberant life on the page. More/less