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 first published in 2007 by Red Hen Press and a new edition was reissued by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2018. Her second book, a biography-in-poems 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. Her poems have, among other places, appeared in the New York Times, Oxford American, Poetry International, Gulf Coast, and Best American Poetry 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 until she gave up her beloved time in the classroom in hope of writing full time. Currently, she is the editor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and teaches periodically at a number of places, including the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program, the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA, Poets House, the Poetry Center at Smith College, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and the Hindman Settlement School. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, North Carolina, where she volunteers at four different animal sanctuaries.

Other poems by Nickole Brown in Verse Daily:
October 26, 2007:   "Footling" " We have heard her tell the story..."

Books by Nickole Brown:

Other poems on the web by Nickole Brown:
Four poems
Three poems
"Against Despair: The Kid Goat"
"The Dead"

Nickole Brown's Website.

About To Those Who Were Our First Gods:

"The strip mall pet store and the dollar store parking lot, in Nickole Brown's wild and embracing poems, are reclaimed as places to discover a connection to our animal cousins. These are not quiet poems, they ring with aints and damns, with hair spray, shit, and the deep rhythms of Biblical speech sung through Appalachia ('If you will, Lord, make me the teeth / hot in the mouth of a raccoon scraping / the junk I scraped from last night's plates'). With clear-eyed, scientifically accurate praise, they even reclaim Romanticism's problematic yen toward personification, showing us how, if done with an awareness of self and how we cloud our own viewing, it can be a way to forge a connection with the wood rat, the parasite-riddled goat, the moth. Brown's poems are full of play, but don't overlook the keen mind at work here. She is tearing down the 'here-for-our-use' capitalistic and patriarchal relationship to animals humanity has used since time immemorial. As she writes in her long poem about the Biblical Samson, 'Because there's a better way to solve this, / and the answer is no longer fear / curdled into rage, a murdered / lion with a swarm sugaring his remains.' If we follow her, we could do better by animals and we just might save ourselves, too. —Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Approaching Ice and Once Removed Nickole Brown creates a new language for our relationships with non-human animals. Her poems are founded on fully embodied listening and yield insights that unify mind, body, and emotions. At a time when such inner and outer connections are too often severed, her poems show us the possibility of wholeness."
—Elizabeth Bradfield