Nickole Brown is the author of Sister, Fanny Says, and The Donkey Elegies. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she volunteers at several 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 that raised her) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. She coauthored Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire with her wife, Jessica Jacobs, and they regularly teach generative writing sessions together as part of their SunJune Literary Collaborative. Every summer, she teaches at the low-residency MFA at the Sewanee School of Letters.