Inventive and dynamic, Nicole Callihan’ s fourth poetry collection, SLIP, navigates midlife with stick in hand and tongue in cheek. As Ellen Bass writes, Callihan “ turns recurrent obsessions like children, husband, mother, laundry, time, art, and body into poems of elastic syntax and shapes– – psalms, prose, lyric, narrative.” Whether looking back at her girlhood, counting out almonds, or singing herself (yet another) birthday song, Callihan’ s luminous linguistics send us on an expansive journey. Sometimes dreamlike, sometimes raucous, these poems teach us how much can be held in a life and on the page. Nicole Callihan was born in Hickory, North Carolina and raised in the Carolinas, South Dakota, and finally, Tulsa, Oklahoma. In 1995, she received a BA from University of Oklahoma and went on to study at New York University where she received an MA in Poetry (1998) and an MFA in Fiction (2005). Callihan is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently, chigger ridge, selected by Sandra Lim for the Tenth Gate Prize which honors a midcareer poet for a “ sustained dedication to developing a unique poetics.” (The Word Works, 2024). Other books include This Strange Garment (Terrapin, 2023); the dual language collaboration, Translucence, with Samar Abdel Jaber (Indolent, 2018); SuperLoop (Sock Monkey, 2014); and several chapbooks including two collaborations with Zoë Ryder White, ELSEWHERE (Sixth Finch 2020) and A Study in Spring (Rabbit Catastrophe, 2015) which won the 2015 Baltic Writing Residency Prize. Her novella, 'The Couples,” was published by Mason Jar Press in summer 2019. Jean Valentine declared Callihan’ s work “ so unpretentious and alive and interesting.” Nicole is also the founder and curator of Braving the Body, an ongoing collaboration with Thomas Dooley’ s Poetry Well which invites poets to reflect on embodied experience and includes workshops, ekphrastic experiences, and the Braving the Body anthology which she co-edited with Pichchenda Bao and Jennifer Franklin and which was released by Harbor Editions in March 2024. A frequent collaborator with artists around the world, she has received fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Ludwig Vogelstein, and Bethany Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Callihan taught in New York University’ s expository writing program for twenty years, where she was a clinical associate professor and a visiting scholar to NYU Abu Dhabi. She lives in Miami.