Julia Hayes retired from teaching high school science several years ago and currently spends time writing, cultivating, and composing poems. She has tended an acre-wide organic garden since the mid 1970s and nurtures separate plots of herbs and wild flowers and roses. She has written columns on food and gardening for the local Willimantic Chronicle and had her cookbook, French Cooking for People Who Can’t, published by Atheneum in 1979. She is currently working on a book of poems to be published in 2009. She formerly taught french cooking classes at the University of Connecticut and was the subject of a half-page feature story in the New York Times for this work. She learned French cooking at french public markets and friends at La Croix de Berny near Paris where she lived for seven years. She holds an undergraduate degree from Albertus Magnus College and a Master’s Degree from Connecticut College.