Julie Sheehan was born and raised in Pierson, Iowa. She received a BA from Yale University and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. She is the author of the poetry collections Thaw (2001); Orient Point (2006), which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise (2010). Sheehan is also the recipient of a Whiting Award.
 
Sheehan’s poems often feature long lines similar to those of Walt Whitman, and she has cited Whitman as an influence in the past. She also writes in traditional forms, including the sonnet and ghazal. Poet Billy Collins has said of her work: “Julie Sheehan possesses a range of tones—tender, sassy, quietly observant, deeply cutting.” Sheehan’s range of subjects includes marriage, relationships, and the landscape of Orient Point, Long Island. The wild nature of things under the urban and cultivated world is treated in many poems, including “Coyotes in Greenwich!”
 
In describing Orient Point, Sheehan commented: “My book is a collage of quilted rhetorics—some more traditional, some experimental, often exploring touchy subjects.” Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise is a collection of poems based on the language and metaphors of cocktails.
 
Sheehan lives on Long Island with her family.