Remembering Nicole Gervasio
Writer • Teacher • Maker • Mentor
We are heartbroken to announce that Nicole Gervasio has passed away from sudden cardiac arrest. Nicole Gervasio was a mentor with Girls Write Now from 2014-2022. In her time with the organization, she supported three mentees through writing, professional, and personal challenges. If you would like to donate in Nicole’s name, Girls Write Now was chosen among three organizations she generously supported.
Nicole bonded to the young people she mentored, doing whatever she could to understand their lived experiences and find points of connection between them. In her first application to Girls Write Now, she noted, “Writing is an extraordinarily intimate process; doing it well requires divulging one’s private thoughts, feelings, experiences, memories, and imagination. However, everything about being a teenager in modern America is almost diametrically opposed to encouraging self-introspection and self-exploration. Teens deal with socially stratifications in high school that are practically feudal in their ruthless, seemingly insurmountable divisiveness. For teens from low-income urban areas, pressures at home only compound the kinds of stress and anxiety that can shut down creative life, inspiring feelings of worthlessness and helplessness. I myself am very familiar with this mindset; having grown up in an urban, working-class home in Trenton, NJ and attended college as a first-generation, self-financed student, I often looked to reading and writing as a welcome escape from a social reality that felt bleak and unrewarding.”
Inspired in part by Girls Write Now, Nicole ran a a diversity-based literacy and creative writing workshop for underserved teens in New York City called The Kaleidoscope Project. Eighteen young people from thirteen different countries came together to read, write, and discuss life together over the course of the summer with Nicole as their guiding force.
After a short break in 2016, Nicole came back to mentoring with Girls Write Now in 2020, this time in the midst of a global pandemic, ready and eager to support young writers as they navigated unprecedented difficulties. And still, she remained adventurous, active, and generous. She noted upon return, “I try to live as adventurously as possible, which means a lot of road trips and hikes with my partner and our two dogs. Before COVID, I visited museums and traveled as often as possible, from Spain most recently to South Africa and Sweden in my college years. I follow the news and politics really closely through the radio and my TIME Magazine subscription. I go to a lot of protests these days. The hobby I recovered during COVID was making jewelry; at this point, I have made baby bracelets for every new mom in my life (of which, there are many).”
The Girls Write Now community is sending love to Nicole’s partner, family, and friends as they mourn her passing. The world was a brighter place with Nicole in it, and we will continue to uplift and celebrate her writing and contributions to her mentees and students.
If you would like to donate in Nicole’s name, Girls Write Now was chosen among three organizations she generously supported.