Bio

Greg Nicholl is the author of Ghost in the Graveyard, winner of the 2025 Hudson Prize and forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2027.

 

Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Greg began his undergraduate education at The Evergreen State College and Pacific Lutheran University where he received his BA in English (Creative Writing) and German. Greg spent a year in Marburg, Germany, studying Germanistik (German language and literature) at Philipps-Universität Marburg. He then earned an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, where he studied with Jean Valentine and Mark Wunderlich, among others.

 

Greg is the winner of the 2021 River Styx International Poetry Contest selected by Adrian Matejka. His poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2023, Ecotone, Gulf Coast, Nimrod, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, Smartish Pace, West Branch, and elsewhere. He was finalist for the 2022 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from Nimrod, the 2021 Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry from New Letters, the 2013 Crab Creek Review Editors’ Prize, and the 2006 Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. In addition, he has been the semi-finalist for the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize (BOA Editions), the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry (U. North Texas Press), Crab Orchard Series in Poetry (Southern Illinois U. Press), and the Philip Levine Prize in Poetry. To date he has received four Pushcart Prize nominations.

 

Greg lives in Columbus, Ohio, and works in publishing as a freelance editor.

... as if the town changed its mind,

it packed itself up, powered down the lights,

and siphoned off the spigots one by one.


(from "The Years")

Poems

Places where my poems can be found online: