About
Renée K. Nicholson is a writer based in Morgantown, West Virginia. Her forthcoming poetry collection FEVERDREAM (Redhawk Publications, 2026) follows POSTSCRIPTS (Wild Ink, 2024), her second full-length poetry book. FIERCE AND DELICATE: ESSAYS ON DANCE AND ILLNESS (WVU Press, 2021) is a memoir-in-essays chronicling the end of her professional ballet career after being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. It was a Housatonic Book Award finalist and praised by Library Journal as "elegant" and Buzzfeed as "lyrical and fascinating." She co-edited BODIES OF TRUTH: PERSONAL ESSAYS ON ILLNESS, DISABILITY, AND MEDICINE (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) and authored ROUNDABOUT DIRECTIONS TO LINCOLN CENTER (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2014). Her work appears in The Gettysburg Review, The Millions, Electric Literature, and Poets & Writers. Awards include the 2022 Nassau Review Prize for Prose and 2018 Susan S. Landis Award. She holds an MFA from West Virginia University and will be 2026 Artist-in-Residence at Chateau D'Orquevaux, France.
In October 2024, she became Series Editor for Connective Tissue at WVU Press. Renée holds a Certificate of Professional Achievement in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University and is a frequent guest lecturer and workshop leader in narrative medicine and health humanities.
Featured Work
Postscripts
Postscripts makes many travels, from the landscapes and cultures of foreign travels, to the long journey through grief. Thrown also into relief is home—for this poet, West Virginia, in the heart of Appalachia—and all the ways it balances the hard-hewn beauty and hardscrabble realities. Like a travel diary or a love letter home, these poems speak to place in all its incarnations: physical, artistic, spiritual, familial, and imagined.
