User:Valnieman/Valerie Nieman

Valerie Nieman Valerie Nieman (born on July 6, 1955) is an American fiction author and poet who draws on her experiences as a farmer and newspaper reporter in the Southeastern United States. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship, grants of support from North Carolina and West Virginia arts councils, and the Kentucky Federation of Women. Her awards include the Greg Grummer Award in Poetry and two Elizabeth Simpson Smith prizes for the best story by a writer in the Carolinas.

Early life and education

Valerie Nieman was born in 1955 in western New York State. Much of her family was involved in dairy farming. Her mother, Eleanor, had grown up in the region, as did her father, Warner Nieman, who was a POW during the Korean War and later worked as a machinist and shop foreman.

She grew up deeply interested in the plants and animals of the Allegheny Plateau, learning to fish, make maple syrup, and harvest wild foods. She enrolled at Jamestown Community College and then transferred to West Virginia University, where she majored in journalism and worked for the student newspaper, the Daily Athenaeum. After graduation, she worked for the Morgantown Dominion-Post and later the Fairmont Times West Virginian, where she would become executive editor. During this time, she was writing poetry and fiction, publishing her first work and winning numerous awards from West Virginia Writers Inc. A narrative poem from this time, The Naming of the Lost, was published in anthologies of Arthuriana and termed "one of the finest modern Arthurian poems."

She has published three novels, a collection of short stories, and a collection of poetry.

Career

Following her graduation from West Virginia University, Nieman worked as a reporter and editor for daily newspapers in West Virginia. She homesteaded a farm, taught as an adjunct at West Virginia University, and published her first novel, Neena Gathering, under the name Valerie Nieman Colander. This SF novel was set in a post-apocalyptic West Virginia and was translated into Portuguese for the Brazilian market, where it was known as Mundo Perdido.

She was a founding co-editor of Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art in the New World, from 1993-1997, and served as co-host of the annual Kestrel literary and arts festival in Fairmont, WV.

In 1997, following the breakup of her marriage, Nieman moved to North Carolina, working as the Rockingham County bureau chief for the News & Record. Her second novel, Survivors, an account of blue-collar family trauma in a fading industrial city in West Virginia, was published in 2000. She began teaching part-time in 2000 at North Carolina A&T State University, where she later became a full-time instructor and then associate professor. She remarried in 2003. In 2004, she graduated from Queens University of Charlotte with an M.F.A., and published Fidelities, a collection of short stories. Her first collection of poetry, Wake Wake Wake, appeared in 2006, and a third novel, Blood Clay, is scheduled for publication in March 2011.

In 2010, she became poetry editor of Prime Number magazine.

Valerie Nieman lives in Greensboro, NC.

External links

* Valerie Nieman - the official author website