Nicolette Polek

Polek is a Slovak-American writer from Northeast Ohio. She is the author of Bitter Water Opera (Graywolf Press, forthcoming April 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.