Nickole Brown / A Jonah

You can read the poem here: A Jonah

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Nickole Brown is an American poet who lives in North Carolina. Her first book, Sister, was originally published in 2007h, but a new edition was reissued by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2018. Her second, Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions and won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. The audiobook of that collection became available in 2017. She teaches at a number of places, including the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs in Asheville, where she periodically volunteers at three different animal sanctuaries. Currently, she’s at work on a bestiary of sorts about these animals, but it won’t consist of the kind of pastorals that always made her (and most of the working-class folks she knows) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it—these poems speak in a queer, Southern-trash-talking kind of way about nature beautiful, damaged, dangerous, and in desperate need of saving. A chapbook of these poems called To Those Who Were Our First Gods won the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and another sequence called The Donkey Elegies was published as a chapbook by Sibling Rivalry Press in early 2020.