Julia Willis earned her bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, in 1973. She began her career as an associate editor for Red Clay Books in 1974.
She has written four books including, Reel Time, a comic novel; We Oughta Be in Pictures, for which she was a Lambda Award drama finalist; Who Wears the Tux?, a lesbian quiz book; and Meow-Mories. Her work has also appeared in numerous women’s anthologies.
Julia was a founding member of the women’s comedy troupe, the Ends and Means Committee. She wrote for the lesbian soap opera, Two in Twenty, and her award-winning one-act comedies have been produced by off-off-Broadway and by gay and lesbian theatres around the country. In addition to reviewing for Lambda Book Report and The Lesbian Review of Books, she has written comedy material for the Boston Baked Theater, Terra Infirma on NPR and for Joan Rivers. She has received fellowships and grants from the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, Massachusetts Artists Foundation, Edward Albee Foundation and MacDowell. She worked as a freelance writer, poet, producer, comedy writer/performer and a playwright through the 1990s.
Her papers are held at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. This collection documents Julia Willis’ career as a writer of books, plays, poetry, comedic writings, short stories, and newspaper columns. The bulk of the material dates from the 1990s and includes manuscripts, drafts, correspondence, scripts, notes, press material, photocopies of awards and recognitions, reviews, clippings, program and other papers.
Julia Willis
Studios
Heyward
Julia Willis worked in the Heyward studio.
The Lodge Annex, a wing on the west side of the men’s dormitory (The Lodge), was completed in 1926. Initially intended as an apartment for a caretaker, the space was soon repurposed as a live-in studio for writers. In recognition of a major endowment gift from the DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Foundation, Lodge Annex was…