Julia Carter Aldrich was born in Webster Groves, Missouri in 1930, the namesake of her great-grandmother, Julia Carter Aldrich (1834-1924), pioneer poet and writer from Wauseon, Ohio. She attended Ward-Belmont Junior College in Nashville, Tennessee, and graduated from New York University. Her uptown life was working in publishing, advertising, and public relations. Her downtown life was among Village writers and painters, publishing poems in a number of journals and reading her poems widely, especially among the emerging women poets of that time. In the '70s she moved with her family to Springs, East Hampton Town, where she was one of the poets who gathered and read at Canio's Books in Sag Harbor. In 1985 she received a summer fellowship grant to the Community of the Arts in Cummington, Massachusetts, where she fell in love with the hilltowns and the people, and stayed. In 1988, after the death of her daughter, she attended Andover Newton Seminary, and is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ.