Nicole VanderLinden is a writer living in Iowa City, Iowa. She currently serves as the fiction/nonfiction book review editor for Colorado Review and as a reader for Ploughshares.

Her fiction and book reviews appear in various publications, and in 2020 Lauren Groff selected her story as the winner of the New Ohio Review Fiction Prize. Recent work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, The Best of the Net, and The Best Small Fictions and has been long-listed for the St. Lawrence Book Award and the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize. Nicole has also been a semi-finalist for Nimrod’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and the Normal School’s Normal Prize, and she’s been the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals award. In 2021, she was awarded a Tennessee Williams fiction scholarship by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Nicole has an MFA in fiction from Colorado State University. Additionally, she’s worked as an editor and instructor, and she’s volunteered time as a crisis intervention specialist at CommUnity, where she was selected as the 2018 Volunteer of the Year. She recently completed a short-story collection (Sorry, Thank You, Hello) and is finishing her first novel, an excerpt of which was long-listed in the 2021 Masters Review Novel Excerpt Contest.