Julie Sampson grew up in mid Devon in the home and idyllic garden created by her grandfather — a stone's throw from the slopes of Dartmoor's Cawsand (Cosdon) Beacon; her roots and dreams are still sited there. Now working as independent researcher, she trained as musician/teacher and later achieved a PhD on the subject of the American writer, H.D., at the University of Exeter. She taught music, then creative writing, at various colleges in the Southwest and was a visiting lecturer in English at the University of the West of England.

She has always written and her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines, anthologies and online. Her work was included in Making Worlds; One Hundred Contemporary Women Poets , 2003, eds. Myra Schneider, Dilys Wood and Gladys Mary Coles. In 1999 one of her poems was runner-up in the Exeter Poetry Prize. More recently she's focused her research on women writers from the Southwest, especially from Devon; papers on the C16 Anne Dowriche have been published in Transactions of the Devonshire Association ; an essay on H.D. in Devon appeared on the HD's Web newsletter; her edition of Lady Mary Chudleigh's Selected Poems was published by Shearsman, in 2009.

Recently her work has been short-listed and placed in several competitions, including the Wells Festival of Literature poetry competition and the erbacce-prize. Sampson's full collection, Tessitura , was published by Shearsman Books, in 2014 and a non-fiction manuscript, Voices from the Wildridge: Women Writers in the Devon Landscape , was short-listed for The Impress Prize, in 2015. Her main website is here.