Valerie Nieman
July 6, 1955 – present
Birth place: Jamestown, New York, USA
Browse magazine works (first published 1983)
Born in New York State, Valerie Nieman graduated from West Virginia University and worked as a newspaper reporter and editor. She completed her M.F.A. in creative writing at Queens University of Charlotte in 2004, and joined the faculty of North Carolina A&T State University, where she has retired as a full professor of English.Besides speculative prose and poetry, she has published three non-genre novels, <i>Survivors</I>, <i>Blood Clay</I> and <i>In the Lonely Backwater</I>, a collection of short fiction, <i>Fidelities</i>, and several poetry collections. Her awards have included a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a North Carolina Arts Council fellowship in 2013-2014, the 1998 and 2002 Elizabeth Simpson Smith prizes for the best short story by a writer in the Carolinas and the 1999 Greg Grummer Prize in poetry from <i>Phoebe</i>. She was a founding editor of <i>Prime Number</i> and <i>Kestrel</i> journals.