Novel, 2023
Valerie Nieman’s In the Lonely Backwater, a Southern gothic suspense novel, received the 2022 Sir Walter Raleigh Award winner for the best book of fiction by a North Carolina writer. To the Bones, her genre-bending folk horror/thriller about coal country, was a finalist for the 2020 Manly Wade Wellman Award.
She is also the author of Blood Clay (Eric Hoffer Award) and two other novels. She has published a short fiction collection and three poetry collections, most recently, Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse. She has published widely in journals and anthologies, and appears regularly in juried reading series such as Piccolo Spoleto, Why There Are Words, and Women of Appalachia. She has held state and NEA creative writing fellowships.
Nieman has degrees from West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte, and was a reporter and farmer in West Virginia before moving to North Carolina, where she was an editor and a creative writing professor at NC A&T State University.
For more information, visit Val’s website.
Course Description
Val’s class will focus on workshopping pages from your novel in progress sent in prior to the workshop. There will be some in-class writing that comes out of the discussions from the texts under consideration as well.