Nickole Brown

Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and, as part of an English-Speaking Union (ESU) Scholarship, studied literature at Oxford University.

Brown is the author of The Donkey Elegies (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020); To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook which won the 2018 Rattle Prize; Fanny Says (BOA Editions, 2015), which won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry; and Sister (Sibling Rivalry Press), first published in 2007 and reissued in 2018. With Jessica Jacobs, she cowrote Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books, 2020). As part of her fellowship at the Black Earth Institute, she coedited, with Erin Couglin Hollowell, a guest issue of About Place Journal dedicated to the more-than-human world. She also coedited, with Craig Santos Perez, the poetry selections for Elementals, a 2024 anthology published by the Center for Humans and Nature.

Early in her career, Brown was an editorial assistant for Hunter S. Thompson. She later worked for ten years at Sarabande Books and also served as a coeditor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series with poet Robert Alexander. With Jacobs, she cofounded the SunJune Literary Collaborative. A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council, Brown has taught, among other places, at the University of North Carolina– Wilmington and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She was the 2024
Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University and is currently a fellow at the Black Earth Institute. Every summer, she teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters low-residency MFA program. Brown is currently the president of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets.