A Novel-in-Poems
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It’s Pub Day!

My novel-in-verse, Bent Cedar Mountain, is officially in the world today. I’ll have a number of events this fall–readings, workshops, panels, appearances–to support this wonderful book, and I’d be happy to sign a copy for you when I see you whether you buy it today (hint, hint) or at later the event.

Early Praise for Bent Cedar Mountain

Julie Hensley’s Bent Cedar Mountain is a brilliant and beguiling poetic enacting novel-in-verse. This one is a fiery and fluid winner… [and] delivers a plot-driven poetic in scintillating passages, vignettes demanding our engagement in rendering the lives impressing one another in the land rich with life and loss . . . This book is at once delightful and a great escape. A must read, share, and return to read again. What a feat!

­—Alison Hedge Coke, author of Look At This Blue

A marriage is a lot like a farm. It can be a place of tenderness—or it can be a place of cruelty. Reader, in your hands is a parable about how that choice sometimes gets taken from us, a careful tale that shows abuse takes hold quietly, through small, hidden brutalities that accumulate until you wake up one day so afraid there’s nothing left to find but courage. Writing with lush detail and exacting empathy, Julie Hensley proves with this collection that she is one of Appalachia’s premiere storytellers. Bent Cedar Mountain will break your heart.

Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of Erase Genesis

Appalachian, Books, Fiction, Literature, Novel

Five Oaks: Emotionally engaging, exceptionally memorable, and unreservedly recommended

July 15, 2025

In her review of Five Oaks for Midwest Book Review, Kitty Johnson describes the novel as “A deftly crafted combination of a coming-of-age novel and a family/sisterhood story” before going on to call it “Emotionally engaging, exceptionally memorable, and unreservedly recommended.”

You can read the full review by clicking the the link above and scrolling to the General Fiction Shelf. And, of course, once you’ve read the novel I’d be so thankful if you added your own review on Amazon, GoodReads, or any other site that let’s you have your say.