Jeannie Nicholas Hears Her Characters
Jeannie Nicholas '63 is the author of Kalayla and the 2025 follow-up Kalayla: Unraveling Triangles. She spoke to Kirkus Reviews about her twisting journey toward becoming an author and the distinct ways in which she envisions her characters.
Reports Kirkus Reviews:
"Long before Jeannie Nicholas had published her first novel, she was working in education and visited a school with an autistic student. 'I was struck by how tuned in a child like that can be,' Nicholas says, reflecting on how many people would consider such students as not fitting a 'normal' structure. 'You have to find ways of reaching out, to meet them on their own ground.'
"With the publication in 2019 of her first novel, Kalayla, and 2025’s Kalayla Unraveling Triangles, Nicholas has spent years meeting her distinct, sometimes frustrating characters—like the sassy 12-year-old Kalayla—on their own terms. 'And that’s not necessarily easy at all.'
"Nicholas started writing in her early 20s, but after attending Bennington College and earning master’s degrees in teaching and counseling at Tufts and Harvard Universities, respectively, her life filled up with other things. By the 1980s, Nicholas was working in school administration. 'I hated it,' she emphasizes. 'I mean, hated it.'
"But at the time, it was a big deal for a woman to be working as an assistant principal in a middle school. She even authored an article on the subject for the Harvard Principals’ Center, titled 'Becoming a Woman Administrator,' but while she was breaking new ground in her field, it wasn’t enough to keep her satisfied. Nicholas constantly moved jobs, trying to appease her restlessness, taking on roles at multiple schools and consistently looking for the next thing. 'I would just get this itch and need to move on to something else,' she says.
"These experiences with young people certainly planted early seeds of the tenacious middle schooler she would eventually write about. (Nicholas remembers that the middle schoolers she dealt with taught her the frankness kids crave: ‘Don’t give me all your adult claptrap,’ she says, imitating former students. ‘Just tell me what the facts are.’) But her path to writing full time about a middle schooler was anything but straightforward and was affected by several turns in her life."