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. 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, is a novel-in-poems. She
is currently at work on her next manuscript, a linked collection tentatively titled Down The
Center Line of Spine.
Though much 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, 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 first 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 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 has 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 professor, 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, 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 teacher in 2008 and, feeling it was her true calling, dedicated
herself to the classroom. 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,
and was also on faculty for Murray State’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing. In 2011,
Nickole moved to Little Rock to begin her work as an Assistant Professor of English at the
University of Arkansas at Little Rock. In addition to tending to her classes there, she also
mentors independent writing projects and serves as the advisor for the student-run literary
magazine, Equinox. In the summer, Nickole spends time in Tennessee at the Sewanee
Young Writers Conference, guiding high-school students through drafts of their early
poems.
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. 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.
She lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, and their motley
collection of ill-behaved, highly lovable pets.
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.
nickolebrown.com