About Christina Nichol

Christina Nichol grew up in Northern California in a region that was called by the native Pomo, “The Place where the Elderberries Grow,” but lived overseas for ten years. She taught English in South Korea, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Kosovo, and the Republic of Georgia, where her satirical novel, Waiting for the Electricity, is set. The novel won a 2012 Rona Jaffe Writers Award and a gold medal in First Fiction at the 2015 California Book Awards.  She received her MFA from the University of Florida and, in 2019, was a Fulbright Scholar in India, where she worked with farmers and indigenous women to tell their own stories about how climate change is impacting their livelihoods. She was a fellow at Seoul Art Space in South Korea, Sozopol Fiction Literary Seminars in Bulgaria, MacDowell, and was a Philip Roth writer-in-residence at Bucknell University. She has also taught creative writing at Interlochen School of the Arts, and currently teaches environmental studies at Sonoma State University.  She has published essays and stories in n+1, Lucky Peach, Guernica, The Rumpus, Harper’s, Subtropics, Lonely Planet, Beside, Quarter After Eight, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian. Christina is particularly interested in the carnivalesque, liminal spaces, decay economies, and story structures that challenge the ideology of individualism.