Nance Van Winckel

Nance Van Winckel was born in Roanoke, Virginia in 1951 and has lived in Spokane, Washington since 1990. She went to high school in Columbus, Wisconsin and graduated from the U. of Wisconsin--Milwaukee in 1973. She is married to the visual artist Rik Nelson.

Beside Ourselves (Miami University Press, 2003) is Nance’s fourth book of poetry. The others are Bad Girl, with Hawk (U. of Illinois Press, 1987), The Dirt (Miami U. Press, 1994), and After A Spell (Miami U. Press, 1998), which received the Washington State Governor’s Award for Poetry. A fifth collection of poems will appear from U. of Washington Press in early 2007.

She's received two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, Poetry Magazine’s Friends of Literature Award, two Washington State Artist Trust Awards, The Midland Authors Award, and awards from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared recently in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, the 2006 Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Gettysburg Review, Field, Volt, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Ploughshares.

She's also published three books of short stories, most recently Curtain Creek Farm (Persea Books, 2000). Quake (U. of Missouri Press, 1998) received the 1998 Paterson Fiction Prize. Limited Lifetime Warranty appeared with the U. of Missouri Press in 1994. New stories appear in The Georgia Review, Colorado Review, and AGNI. Nance received a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship for 2005 for a work in progress.

Nance taught at Lake Forest College in Illinois (1979-90) and currently teaches in the MFA in Writing programs at Eastern Washington University and Vermont College. She was editor of the literary journal Willow Springs from 1990-96. She served as the 2000 Richard Hugo Poet in Residence at the University of Montana and as the 2006 U. of North Dakota Poet in Residence. She has taught at Centrum Writers Conference, Utah’s Writers @ Work, Portland Oregon’s Wordstock, Seattle’s Hugo House, and at several other writing festivals and conferences.

She also teaches a 4-day seminar each year (mid-March), along with fiction writer Patricia Henley, at a post-MFA seminar in St. Augustine, Florida. For more information on this seminar, see the Events link above, or contact: Rikn@ArtsEnrich.com.

She is available for readings and teaching residencies and can be contacted at: nvanwinckel@ewu.edu or by phone at: 509-623-4267.