Emily Nemens

Website

Emily grew up in Seattle, then moved east for a BA in art history and studio art at Brown. She studied fine art in Madrid and interned at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art before moving to Brooklyn, where she worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Institute of Architects while pursuing her own writing, illustration, and design projects. She relocated to Baton Rouge in 2011 for LSU’s creative writing MFA program, and became the prose editor of The Southern Review in 2013.

She has two short collections: a novella-length book of stories, Scrub, was published in 2007 in conjunction with her residency at the Kerouac Project of Orlando, and was shortlisted for a 2008 IPPY (short story category). A cross-genre chapbook, Butcher Papers, was published in 2014 by Sibling Rivalry Press. Honors include a special mention in the 2015 Pushcart anthology, merit scholarships to the Sewanee Writers' Conference (Barry Hannah Scholar) and DISQUIET: Lisbon, and being named a HEEB 100. She is currently working on her first full-length collection, linked stories about spring training baseball in Arizona.

As an illustrator, she’s collaborated with Harvey Pekar, been featured in Huffington Post, and snuck a piece into the Met. Also at the Met, she edited the book "Painting Words, Sculpting Language: Creative Writing Workshops at the Metropolitan Museum of Art." Her miniature watercolor portraits of every woman in the 112th and 113th US Congress were featured across the web and on national TV.

Prize anthology mentions

Pushcart (Fiction) 2015*

Pushcart (Fiction) 2020*

* indicates notable/special mention

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