Julie Azzam
MFA Program Assistant Director
As the Assistant Director of the MFA Program, Julie works closely with the Graduate Program Director, affiliated faculty, and graduate students on all Graduate Program-related issues ranging from admissions, recruitment and enrollment, academic advising, and plans and schedules reviews, studio visits, and lectures, and special events.
Julie is also a writer, editor, and researcher and received a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh specializing in comparative postcolonial fiction in English, French, and Arabic from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Southeast Asia. Julie currently writes on children’s literature and the study of childhood in the immigrant and refugee stories, and the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, and disability. Julie has interviewed New York Times bestselling children’s authors for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and has publications in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), the Horn Book Magazine, the Horn Book‘s “Family Reading” blog, Mondoweiss, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, and others. She is a regular reviewer of children’s literature to the Horn Book Magazine. Julie is an avid runner and swimmer and is a Board Member of her local Allegheny Mountain Masters Swimming committee.