Julia Hou is a writer from Queens. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, New Letters, The Cincinnati Review, West Branch, and others. She is the winner of the 2026 Ploughshares Emerging Writers’ Contest in fiction, the 2026 Epiphany Fresh Voices Fellow, a Vermont Studio Center Fellow, and has also received support for her work from Bread Loaf, the McCormack Writing Center, and the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop. She is an MFA student in fiction at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers' Program.
She has previously worked as a software engineer at Jane Street and as an intern at Meta, Square, and NASA.
