Nickole Brown

Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and studied literature at Oxford University. 

Brown is the author of The Donkey Elegies (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020); Fanny Says (BOA Editions, 2015), a biography in poems about Brown’s grandmother, which won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry; and Sister (Sibling Rivalry Press), which was first published in 2007 and reissued in 2018. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of nine poems published by Rattle, won the 2018 Rattle Prize. With Jessica Jacobs, her wife and a fellow poet, she co-wrote Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books, 2020).

Brown 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.

Early in her career, Brown was the editorial assistant for Hunter S. Thompson. She then worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She currently teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters’ MFA program and in the Great Smokies Writing Program at the University of North Carolina Asheville. She and Jacobs also regularly teach generative writing sessions together as part of their SunJune Literary Collaborative. Brown lives in Asheville, North Carolina.