About Julie Kabat

Julie Kabat has toured internationally as a composer, performer, singer, and storyteller. She has also been recognized as a pioneer in the field of arts in education. As a teaching artist, she presented many professional development workshops for teachers to explore how children can learn to read and write using strategies from the performing arts. For over forty years, she worked with students in inner city and rural schools, empowering young people to discover an authentic writer's voice while learning how to write poems, stories, and plays that they set to music and performed.

Julie's compositions include vocal, choral, theater and chamber music. She composed a series of site-specific pieces to celebrate the earth and a sense of place. These works were commissioned by the Utah New Music Festival in Zion Canyon, Adirondack Park Centennial, two schools on the Navajo Reservation and, during a twelve-year project, communities up and down the Hudson River. She created and toured Child and the Moon-Tree, a one-woman opera for voice and computerized synthesizers, inspired by her studies of Noh Theater in Kyoto, Japan.

Along the way, Julie raised her two daughters as a single mom and now visits her five grandchildren who live in Hawaii and the Netherlands. She resides with her life partner Wayne Shelton and their cat in the Hudson River Valley down the street from the North Chatham Free Library where she is a longtime trustee. Love Letter from Pig is her first published book.