Biography

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Nancy has had poems on display in the Billie Jean King Main Library in Long Beach, Calif., as a part of the “Between the Divide” exhibition for 2019 Professional Artist Fellows. She has also had her poems on display in the Ruth B. Shannon Art Gallery in Whittier, Calif., as a part of a multi-media project, “Bridges.” She was selected as an Emerging Voices Fellow with PEN America in 2015, and an Idyllwild Writer Week Fellow in 2019.

Nancy is the author of two chapbooks, Bearing the Juice of It All (Finishing Line Press, 2016) and Rampant (Sadie Girl Press, 2014). Her third (unpublished) chapbook, Good Darkness, was named a Semi-Finalist in the Sunken Garden chapbook contest with Tupelo Press in 2021. In 2014, she collaborated on a poetry and music project called Face the Blaze with Blacksheep Music Productions.

Nancy has performed poetry in diverse venues, from barber shops to pizza parlors to college campuses to art museums. She has had poems published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Radar Poetry, Confrontation Magazine, The Rusty Toque, and Stirring.

Pre-pandemic, Nancy was sharing her love of poetry with 5th grade classrooms as an artist-teacher with Angels Gate Cultural Center. In 2018, she received a grant from the California Center for the Book to organize Community Conversations About the Arts with the Long Beach Public Library.

Alongside her work in the literary world, Nancy has completed Council I training for facilitators with the Center for Council. In 2021, she completed the Climate Corps Reality Training. Over a decade of community activism, she has co-founded multiple nonprofit arts organizations, including the Long Beach Literary Arts Center.

Pre-pandemic, Nancy hosted a biannual reading series at the Long Beach Public Library, Off the Page: The Story Behind the Stanzas. She has been a guest speaker at Occidental College, OCSA, UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, Mt. San Antonio College, and others. She’s served as a guest poetry judge for the OCSA Poetry Slam.

Nancy also works as a freelance writer and editor. She has a degree in sociology from UC Santa Cruz and lives in Long Beach, California. Her work is largely inspired by the magic and power of the natural world.

Artist Statement

According to poet Robert Carr, “poets repeat the same prayer in different words.” My prayer is: I wish to empower grace. I write to see what I can’t see yet, to experience perspectives beyond my own and stretch my understandings of the world. I am constantly working to explore the concept of magic in modern life. I tend to believe that magic operates from a core of wonder and gratitude, present in everything from the mundane miracle of grocery stores, to the approach of a butterfly on a calm spring day, to the vast expanse of galaxies and universes. I am fascinated by the tension between: science and mysticism, body and spirit, masculine and feminine, modern technology and ancient mythologies, mortality and collective consciousness. 

I’ve been a poet since I was eight years old but it was around age 22 that I officially came out of denial. I agree with Robert Frost: "Being a poet is a condition." Looking back, I’ve always loved cartwheeling with language and exploring consciousness. I write poetry because this is how my brain and my spirit are wired: to see in images and create in words. I write because putting words on a page is how I best know how to exist. The more I embrace the process, the wider the openings become. I wish for my poems to be gifts to the reader, so a driving question is, “Who do I have to be to write the poems I want to write?”