Julia Hou is a fiction writer and software engineer based in Brooklyn. She is a former editorial intern for Cleaver Magazine and reader for The Oakland Review. She is the creator of a digital artist book, Asterisk, and an alum of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her fiction was long-listed for the 2024 Disquiet Literary Prize. At Carnegie Mellon, she was the recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Writing Award for a creative nonfiction piece later published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She also received the Adamson Award for a short collection of poems.

She currently works at Jane Street as a software engineer, and has interned at Meta, Square, and NASA.

In her free time, she enjoys long runs and walks, climbing, reading absurd or hypnotic or luscious fiction, drinking tea, petting cats, forgetting to water her plants, and muttering to herself on the subway about her stories.