Julie Swarstad Johnson bridges science and poetry through her writing on the night sky, astronomy, and space exploration. She is the author of the poetry collections The Night Season (forthcoming 2027) and Pennsylvania Furnace (2019), as well as the chapbook Orchard Light (2020). She co-edited Beyond Earth's Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight (2020), a poetry anthology collecting sixty years of writing about space exploration.

 

She has been Poet in Residence at Lowell Observatory and Gettysburg National Park. In March 2024, she was a crew member for Imagination 1, a simulated lunar mission with an all-artist crew at Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona. Her work is also included in Moon Bound, the first book to be purposefully sent to the Moon and an international project of the Moon Gallery Foundation. She works as an archivist and librarian at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.