Nance Van Winckel

Nance Van Winckel, poet and fiction writer, is the author of five books of fiction, most recently Ever Yrs, a novel in the form of a scrapbook (Twisted Road Publications, 2014) and Boneland: Linked Stories (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013). Other books of fiction include Curtain Creek Farm (Persea Books, 2000), Quake (University of Missouri Press, 1997), and Limited Lifetime Warranty (University of Missouri Press, 1994).

Her ninth collection of poems is The Many Beds of Martha Washington (2021), from the Northwest Poetry Series. A previous collection, Our Foreigner, won the Pacific Coast Poetry Award (Beyond Baroque Books, 2016). Other collections of poems include Pacific Walkers (U. of Washington Press, 2013), No Starling (U. of Washington Press, 2007), Beside Ourselves (Miami University Press, 2000), After a Spell (Miami University Press, 1998), The Dirt (Miami University Press, 1994), and Bad Girl, with Hawk (University of Illinois, 1988).

She also works with visual poetry, altered pages of old books and other visual hybrid forms. Her first collection of this work is Book of No Ledge (Pleiades Press, 2016).

Nance has taught since 1990 for the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is also a Professor Emerita at Eastern Washington University and the recipient of two NEA fellowships, the Paterson Fiction Prize, the American Short Fiction Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Gordon Barber Poetry Award, a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and numerous other honors. She was the Stadler Poet in Residence at Bucknell in 2009.

Nance lives in Spokane, Washington with her husband, artist Rik Nelson.