Julie Modra grew up in the NSW town of Taree and the idyllic seaside community of Forster-Tuncurry. Her beloved grandmother was an Indigenous woman from the Worimi Nation on the NSW coast. In her teens, Julie wrote poetry, as well as puppet plays to be performed in her local church. In her late teens, Julie lived with a caring and generous elderly couple on their farm. This added the final ingredients, along with her passion for literature, to her becoming her own version of Anne of Green Gables, complete with the red hair and freckles. Julie later settled in the bayside area of Redland City, Brisbane, with her husband and three daughters.

A trained secondary English and History teacher, Julie has more than a decade of experience in teaching and curriculum writing. She has also worked as a sessional tertiary lecturer teaching Western Literary Tradition and Australian Literature, where she immersed herself in her love of English literature and poetry. Julie is a graduate of the Australian Writers’ Centre and is currently studying a Master of Creative Writing at Macquarie University. She has a keen interest and expertise in the areas of writing craft, developmental editing, and copyediting. She champions other writers in their creative pursuits by facilitating writing workshops and manuscript workshopping, as well as teaching the craft of writing.

Julie writes hope-filled middle-grade and teen fiction, as well as adult fiction in the inspirational, literary, and historical fiction genres, which are often infused with romantic elements. Having experienced extreme domestic violence as a child, and later walking through her middle daughter’s battle with cancer and the loss of her first husband to cancer, she aims to write stories that are full of heart and carry messages of hope.

When Julie is not writing or studying, she procrastinates by sewing garments to wear, camping off-grid in nature with her wonderful husband Brian and their maremma sheepdog Shiloh, serving as a drummer and pianist in her local church, watching her backyard chickens while sipping tea, spending time with family, and looking after her precious grandchildren.