Julia A. Moore (1847–1920)

Julia A. Moore, née Julia Ann Davis, was born into rural poverty on a farm in Plainfield Township, Michigan.
She attended school through the third grade, when her mother’s illness forced her to take on many adult responsibilities. To help support the family, she began writing in her teens, specializing in poetry about dead children and lovers. Her first volume of poems, The Sentimental Song Book, was published in 1876 and later reissued as The Sweet Singer of Michigan Salutes the Public. She also performed in Grand Rapids, both declaiming and singing, with orchestra. Her maudlin and sentimental verses were often parodied, including by Ogden Nash and by Mark Twain, who drew on them in creating the character of Emmeline Grangerford in Huckleberry Finn. A volume of her collected works, Mortal Refrains: The Complete Collected Poetry, Prose, and Songs of Julia A. Moore, edited and with an introduction by Thomas J. Riedlinger, was published in 1998. Since 1994, the Flint Public Library has held the Julia A. Moore Poetry Festival to celebrate bad poetry.