Nicolette Polek
Nicolette Polek '15 is the author of Bitter Water Opera (Graywolf Press, 2024) and Imaginary Museums (Soft Skull Press, 2020). She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and is currently based in New York.
Biography
Polek is a Slovak-American writer from Northeast Ohio. She is the author of Bitter Water Opera (Graywolf Press, 2024) and Imaginary Museums (Soft Skull Press, 2020), which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham award. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in The Atlantic, the Paris Review Daily, BOMB, Spike Art Quarterly, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Bennington College, an MFA from University of Maryland, and an MA in Religion and Literature from Yale Divinity School. She writes about representations of faith, despair, and the possibilities/limitations of art. She is based in New York, where she also teaches creative writing at SUNY Purchase.
Polek was a visiting faculty member at Bennington for Fall 2023 and returns Fall 2024.