On May 8, 2026, Julie Elise Landry graduated from the University of New Orleans (UNO) Creative Writing Workshop (CWW) with a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Poetry. An MFA is a terminal degree.

Julie earned her MFA after passing comprehensive exams "with distinction" in October 2025 and defending her thesis "with distinction" in April 2026.

Under the direction of UNO professor Carolyn Hembree and with advisement from UNO professors John Gery and Kay Murphy, Julie compiled and defended her thesis, Fanatic's Prayer, a collection of thirty poems with a preface on poetics. Fanatic's Prayer "exposes an obsessive, ruminating mind that struggles to determine its place and identity in a disconcerting world." The collection "scrutinizes desire, self-regulation, and gender through lyrical and precise language."

Julie read from her thesis at the end-of-year CWW banquet and awards ceremony on May 10, 2026. She was introduced by her thesis director, Carolyn Hembree.

"I recognize in Julie my own kind," Hembree said. "A woman who puts up with little guff, is meticulous, intense, loyal, (and knows how to hold a grudge). I admire Julie, not only as a person but as a poet with an exquisite ear and a mad gift for persona...  She has been the glue that has held the poets together. She kept her peers from disappearing into a nebulous poet land where deadlines, ScholarWorks, and word counts float by like little clouds... I put my complete faith in Julie and her work."

The CWW nominated Julie for the 2026 Best New Poets anthology published by the University of Virginia Press. Two poets were nominated: one from the in-person/resident workshop (CWR) and one from the online/low-residency workshop (CWL).

Julie received an honorable mention for the 2026 Andrea Saunders Gereighty/Academy of American Poets Poetry Award. The contest was judged by poet Julia Johnson, a professor at the University of Kentucky.

The CWW also awarded Julie the Fredrick Barton Service Award, which celebrates "those who have given more to the program than was ever asked of them and who have made the program better because of it." In awarding her this honor, CWW director M.O. Walsh said that Julie "came to every faculty member's mind when we discussed this award," describing Julie as "an energetic volunteer for things both seen and unseen by their peers... She wrote our entire alumni newsletter—which consisted of reaching out to interview several alums across the country and writing professional articles about them—for no pay, no applause—until this moment."

Previously, Julie earned a Master of Arts (MA) in English with a concentration in creative fiction from the University of Louisiana at Monroe.

The May 8 commencement was the final to be held by the University of New Orleans. In July 2026, UNO will transfer into a different university system and begin operating under a different name.

Julie Elise Landry's poem "Fuseli's Elf in The Nightmare to the Agent of Intrusion" received an Honorable Mention for the University of New Orleans 2026 Andrea Saunders Gereighty/Academy of American Poets Poetry Award.

Julie will be honored at the Creative Writing Workshop MFA program's Spring Awards Banquet and will receive a certificate of recognition from the Academy of American Poets in New York. Her poem will be published in Ellipsis, a journal that publishes work by members of the UNO community.

The contest was open to all students at UNO. The 2026 Andrea Saunders Gereighty/Academy of American Poets Poetry Award winner was Kayla Harris.

Distinguished judge Julia Johnson said, "Landry's ekphrastic poem is a magical delight, a modern day rendering of The Nightmare."

"Fuseli's Elf in The Nightmare to the Agent of Intrusion" is a persona poem in the voice of the incubus from the famous painting by Henry Fuseli. Julie presented a reading of the poem on May 3, 2026 for the UNO virtual reading series, Silver Room.

Julie Elise Landry's play Are You Sleeping? was chosen for the 2026 Scripts Unbound reading series coordinated by the UNO Creative Writing Workshop (CWW) and the UNO School of the Arts (SOTA).

Scripts Unbound invites CWW/SOTA students to submit original work for consideration by a selection committee, and SOTA presents public readings of the chosen plays. After each reading, audience members provide feedback and answer questions from the Scripts Unbound host, describing their experiences of the work and suggesting considerations for revision.

Of the plays submitted for 2026, the selection committee chose four to be presented in the series.

In Landry's play, two cousins confront the irrevocable differences in their experiences of their family at the funeral of their grandmother—while the erratic spirit of their grandmother interjects and shares her own animated (re-animated!) opinions. Are You Sleeping? explores the subtle damage done amongst families and the difficulty of communicating those harms to one other.

The reading will be held March 16, 2026 at 7:00 PM in the UNO Nims Lab Theatre.

On January 24, 2026, Trampoline published Julie Elise Landry's poem "Indistinguishable" in Issue #30.10 of the weekly online poetry journal.

Trampoline "veer[s] towards the beautiful and strange" when selecting poems for publication. "We want poems of anger and light. We want to be a space where the narrative, the lyric, and the experimental can mingle." 

Landry's poem "Indistinguishable," written for her longtime friend and fellow poet Maudie Bryant, examines the plasticity of self-image and the gendered social dynamics of early adulthood while celebrating a friendship rooted in subversion, thought, and noise.

On October 15, 2025, Julie Elise Landry's poem "How to Learn about Lizards after a Phobia" was named as a finalist in the LMNL Arts 2025 Patty Friedmann Writing Contest associated with the Words & Music literary festival hosted by One Book One New Orleans.

Only five poets were named finalists out of a record number of submissions.

Contest judge Andy Young selected a poem by Daniel W.K. Lee as the winner and poems by Nat Gove and Carole Greenfield as the runners-up.

"This was a very hard task!" Young said. "All of the finalists’ poems were so strong!"

Landry's poem "How to Learn about Lizards after a Phobia" draws on her experiences with overcoming a lifelong lizard phobia and then becoming incredibly curious about the lizards that once plagued her. Set in an online world of digital research, the poem reckons with the invasive brown lizards (anolis sagrei) driving the native green lizards (anolis carolinensi) of New Orleans into the trees and with the speaker's lingering memories of her own fear.

"I've drafted an entire chapbook about lizards, about this phobia," Landry said. "Most of those poems are interrelated, so I hope to see them published together one day—but this poem, I think, stands quite on its own!"