Nickole Brown is the author of Sister and Fanny Says. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she periodically volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. She writes about these animals, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature. To Those Who Were Our First Gods won the Rattle Chapbook Prize, and her essay in poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press. She teaches every summer as part of the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program and directs the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual environmental poetry festival set to take place for the first time in Black Mountain, North Carolina, in October 2025.
