Note: 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, Survivors, Blood Clay and In the Lonely Backwater, a collection of short fiction, Fidelities, 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 Phoebe. She was a founding editor of Prime Number and Kestrel journals.