Renée Nicholson

Renée K. Nicholson, MFA, is widely known for her scholarship in the interdisciplinary fields of narrative medicine, health humanities, and art in medicine.

Renée is a frequent speaker in narrative medicine and consultant in the health humanities, as well as the Series Editor of Connective Tissue, an innovative and interdisciplinary book series that explores the human condition and its intersection with health, illness, and healing through the lens of the humanities and its methodologies, as well as through expressive creative works that illuminate people’s lived experience with health, illness, and medicine. This series seeks to publish books that cover innovative approaches to healthcare, integrating expressive arts and humanities practices into health settings, as well as books of creative writing that artfully render stories of illness, disability and healthcare.

She is the author of three books: Fierce and Delicate: Essays on Dance and Illness, and two volumes of poetry, Postscripts and Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center. She’s published creative and scholarly works in over a hundred venues, including Poets & Writers, The Millions, Electric Literature, The Gettysburg Review, Leadership and the Humanities, Bellevue Literary Review, and many others. She is a past recipient of the Prize for Prose from The Nassau Review.

Winner of the Susan S. Landis Prize from the West Virginia Division of Culture, History and the Arts for her work writing life stories with patients with cancer, Renée’s narrative medicine projects have received funding from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and the West Virginia Humanities Council. She has also received funding from the West Virginia Commission on the arts.

As well, Renée’s ongoing scholarship can be found at Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, where she is a contributing writer. She is first author on a chapter, “The Interdisciplinarity of the Health Humanities” in the Handbook of Interdisciplinary Teaching and Administration, and co-editor of the award-winning anthology Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives of Illness, Disability, and Medicine (with Dinty W. Moore and Erin Murphy). She served as a consulting writer on Off Belay: One Last Great Adventure by Jamie Shumway, the Associate Dean Emeritus for Medical Education at WVU School of Medicine. She is a creative partner in the storytelling project, Healthcare Is Human, in Martinsburg, WV. She holds a Certificate of Professional Achievement in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University.

At WVU, Renée was the recipient of two Foundation-level awards: The Neil S. Bucklew Award for Social Justice and the Nicholas Evans Award for Excellence in Academic Advising. She is also a past recipient of the Award for Outstanding Service by the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. Renée served both a past Director of the Programs in MDS and past Director of the WVU Humanities Center.