about nickole
Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. Her first collection, Sister, a novel-in-poems, was published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, a biography-in-poems about her grandmother called Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions in 2015 and won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. The audio book of that collection came out in 2017. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for four years and was the co-editor of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series for ten. She’s taught at a number of places, including the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA and the Hindman Settlement School. She lives in Asheville, NC, where she periodically volunteers at a three different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. Her work speaks in a Southern-trash-talking way about nature beautiful, damaged, dangerous, and in desperate need of saving. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. In 2021, Spruce Books of Penguin Random House published Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a book she co-authored with Jessica Jacobs, with whom she co-founded the SunJune Literary Collaborative. In 2024, she’ll be the Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University, and she teaches every summer at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program. Currently, she’s the President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual environmental literary festival set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October of 2025.
Should you be interested in having Nickole read or teach for your organization, please contact Anya Backlund at Blue Flower Arts:
845-677-8559 / anya@blueflowerarts.com
Extended Bio
As a poet with an MFA in Fiction, Nickole Brown has a strong leaning toward cross-genre work, an interest reflected in her two collections of poems as well as her most recent chapbooks. Fanny Says, published by BOA Editions in 2015, is a biography-in-poems about her grandmother, Frances Lee Cox, and Sister, her debut collection (published by Red Hen Press in 2007 and reissued by Sibling Rivalry in 2018), is a novel-in-poems. Most recently, she's been writing about the relationship between humans and animals in poems that operate like lean, lyric essays. A sample of new poems called To Those Who Were Our First Gods won Rattle's 2018 Chapbook Contest and was published in December 2018, and an essay-in-poems (in a 25-part sequence) called The Donkey Elegies was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020.
Though some of her childhood was spent in Deerfield Beach, Florida, Nickole considers herself a Kentucky native. For nearly ten years, she worked at Twice Told, a used bookstore in Louisville, where she received the vast majority of her literary education from its cranky and brilliant proprietor, Harold Maier. There, she also gained much of her early experiences as a writer with a local movement called Rant for the Literary Renaissance. It was with this raucous group that she gave some of her first readings, published her first chapbook, Mud, and later traveled to New York University to share the stage with poets Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. Shortly after this period, she met Hunter S. Thompson (also from Louisville) and in 1996, she went to Woody Creek, Colorado, to work as his Editorial Assistant. Upon Thompson’s death in 2005, Nickole wrote a short feature documenting her time there for Poets & Writers.
Early on, she received her training as a writer at Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts and thereafter had the honor of winning a Scholastic Writing award whose prize was a beloved Brother word processor, weighing in at a whopping thirty pounds, and an invitation to read her winning entry with Garrison Keillor at New York's Waldorf Astoria. She graduated summa cum laude from University of Louisville and studied Romantic Poetry at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar. In 2003, she received her MFA in Fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts and continued her engagement with that program by returning to campus as a Visiting Poet and by assisting with the coordination of their writing residencies in Slovenia and Puerto Rico.
For ten years, Nickole worked at the nonprofit, independent, literary press, Sarabande Books as Director of Marketing and Development. There, she helped to garner national attention for the press and its authors. With over a hundred titles in print or under contract, this press is considered to be one of the strongest independents in the country. In November of 2008, Publishers Weekly ran an article featuring her work as a publicist, and for several years after her tenure at Sarabande, she continued to work as a publicity consultant for individual poets as well as for national venues including the Palm Beach Poetry Festival and Arktoi Books, an imprint founded by the poet Eloise Klein Healy dedicated to publishing literary fiction and poetry by lesbian writers.
Now, as a teacher and mentor, Nickole passes on what she has learned of the publishing industry to her students, regularly teaching seminars on independent publishing both to her university students and to writers at conferences. She has participated in many panels on publishing, including presentations at the Associated Writing Programs Conference, The Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Florida Literary Arts Conference, The Virginia Festival of the Book, The Oxford Conference for the Book, The Jackson Hole Writers' Conference, and Ball State University. She also keeps a toe in the publishing industry by working with Robert Alexander as Editor of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series. This series is dedicated to the appreciation, enjoyment, and understanding of American prose poetry and publishes about one book annually through White Pine Press.
Nickole began her work as a professor in 2008. Since then, she’s led many workshops in Fiction and Poetry, and has also designed and taught interdisciplinary courses that use literature to spark history to life, particularly African-American and Queer Civil Rights in the United States. She has taught at Bellarmine University, University of Louisville, and Antioch University Midwest. For four years, Nickole worked as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and in addition to tending to her classes there, she mentored independent writing projects and served as the advisor for the student-run literary magazine, Equinox. In 2015, she made the difficult decision to resign from this tenure-track position in order to have more time to write and work with students in a deeper, more concentrated way. Since then, she has spent time teaching as part of the low-resideny MFA Program at Murray State, Writing Workshops in Greece, the Sewannee Young Writers Conference, and the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program. She also regularly teaches workshops at conferences and residencies, including Poets House, Hugo House, the Poetry Society of North Carolina, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, the Hindman Settlement School, 24 Pearl Street at The Fine Arts Works Center at Provincetown, and the Sanibel Island Writers Conference.
Nickole thinks of poetry as an audio art—something to be heard and not just read on the page—and enjoys giving readings. When Sister, her first collection, was published in 2007, she toured for years, giving over eighty readings in venues as far and wide as San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Virginia, Ann Arbor, Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Florida, and Portland, Oregon, and her tour for Fanny Says covered over twenty states in one year. In 2019, she was on the road for nine months giving readings, visiting classes, and teaching guest workshops. She’s shared the stage with many poets she admires, including Mark Doty, Natasha Trethewey, and Matthew Zapruder. But she also enjoys low-key venues—in the past, she’s given readings on summer lawns in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, on the wobbly stages of roughneck bars in Nashville, and in a packed Waffle House in Eastern Kentucky. The audio book Fanny Says was recorded by Talking Book in 2017.
From 2004 until 2021, Nickole attended the Palm Beach Poetry Festival nearly every year, a gathering that featured some of America’s finest poets, including luminaries such as Sharon Olds, Joy Harjo, Patricia Smith, and Thomas Lux, among many others. For those fruitful years, the festival was cherished by participants from around the world who returned year after year until the venue in Delray closed and we had to say goodbye to beloved President and Founder Miles Coon. But before his passing, Miles looked to the festival’s future by appointing Nickole as its President. Holding fast to Miles’ abiding love of poetry but yet urged by the current ecological crisis of our changing climate, Nickole envisioned the next iteration of the festival as a celebration not only of poetry’s artistry but also its ability to move people to empathy and action.
Now relocated to the mountains of Western North Carolina, the festival goes by a different name—the Hellbender Gathering of Poets. This not only avoids confusion as to our current location but also hopes to raise awareness of a little-known creature endemic to our very backyard in the waters here—a giant salamander by the name of the Eastern Hellbender. Often revered as our “last dragon,” this aquatic wonder is currently threatened, with the population shrinking with each passing season. As an indicator species requiring cool, clean, uncontaminated water to survive, the presence of hellbenders indicates a healthy ecosystem, something that all beings—human and other—require.
She currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her motley collection of ill-behaved, highly lovable pets. There, she is happily on the Advisory Board for Orison Books and teaches periodically as part of UNCA's Great Smokies Writing Program. Currently at work on a collection of poems about animals, she volunteers whenever she can at Animal Haven of Asheville, the Western North Carolina Nature Center, Heart of Horse Sense, and Appalachian Wild. She also spends vast amounts of time hiking in the mountains, trolling around her favorite indie bookstore in town (Yay, Malaprops!), and sipping herself into a frenzy with the particularly strong yerba mate at the nearby Dobrá Tea.
Nickole has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. With their support, she was able to make the changes in her life that allowed her to keep writing. It's no understatement to say that without their generosity, the vast majority of her poems would not exist. (In 2017, she published a statement about her experience with the NEA for the Academy of American Poets.)