Nicole Marie Gervasio, Ph.D. is a Lecturer-in-Discipline of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she teaches the flagship literature course for all first-year students. To date, she is the only instructor to have won Columbia’s Core Meyerson Award for Teaching Excellence in Literature Humanities twice, in addition to the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student. Until recently, she worked at PEN America, where she curated New York’s largest annual international literary festival and developed community-engaged writing programs for low-wage workers and recent migrants to the US. Prior to 2019, she served as a postdoctoral fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brown University and received her Ph.D. in postcolonial literature and feminist theory at Columbia University, where her dissertation focused on the politics of representing state violence in contemporary literature from around the world. At present, she is finishing her first novel, a dark satire and coming-of-age tale about a young terrorist who misperceives his white male privilege and questionable sanity as the incendiary potential America needs to start a cultural revolution. She has been a mentor in the Writing Mentoring Program at Girls Write Now on and off since 2015 and also volunteers at Word Up Community Bookshop / Librería Comunitaria in Washington Heights, which she encourages everyone to visit.
