Julia Thacker first came to Massachusetts as a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The work she produced there was subsequently awarded a National Endowment For the Arts Fellowship and a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe.

The granddaughter of a Harlan County coal miner, Julia sets much of her fiction against the backdrop of a vanishing Appalachian culture. Her stories have been published in Antaeus, The Boston Globe Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, New Directions, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology.

An excerpt from her novella, The Funeral of the Man Who Wasn't Dead Yet, appeared in AGNI Magazine, where it won the John Cheever Award for Short Fiction. Her poem "For An Abandoned Library In Detroit" was a Missouri Review poem of the week. New poems appear in At Length, Bennington Review, The Massachusetts Review and The Southern Humanities Review.

She has taught creative writing at Tufts University, Harvard University Summer School, and the Radcliffe Seminars, and currently conducts private seminars in fiction and memoir writing. She holds a Master of Arts from Brown University.