Julie Ruble lives in Charlotte, NC with a poodle and an aquatic turtle. She teaches middle school language arts and writes Willow Bird Baking, a food blog. She wrote the poems found in Especially the Deer while in high school and at Davidson College, where she was awarded both the Patricia Cornwell Creative Writing Scholarship and the Vereen Bell Memorial Award in poetry. She is the co-author of Especially the Deer, which was first published in 2003 and was re-released in paperback in 2011.