Nancy Hightower is a photographer, author, and college teacher who has written essays about spirituality, politics, and mental health for NBC News Think, Sojourners, and The Huffington Post. Her photographs have been on the cover of Epiphany Magazine, Cagibi Lit, and Gargoyle, and featured on NBCNewYork as part of Brian Rashid’s Love Letters to New York series (appearing about half way through the video). Her most recent interview with Miracle Jones can be found in The Evergreen Review, and she has work in Metropolitan Magazine and Cobra Milk.
Her photography captures New York City through puddle reflections or cars, offering an uncanny presentation of the city that borders on science fiction and fantasy. Barren winter trees dance while the pavement become stone gods. Every puddle is a modality, then, a transformational space that reflects a more dynamic reality if we remain present enough to embrace it. If interested in seeing an online gallery of her work, please send her an email.
Nancy also reviewed science fiction and fantasy for The Washington Post and NPR; and her creative nonfiction, flash fiction, and poetry have appeared in journals such as Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Sundog Lit, and Drunk Monkeys. She is the author of Elementarí Rising (2013) and a poetry collection, The Acolyte (Port Yonder Press, 2015).
She received a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Denver and taught the rhetorics of the fantastic, uncanny, and grotesque in art and literature at the University of Colorado and went on to be the art columnist for Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s Weird Fiction Review. She currently teaches classes on writing for the art and design profession at the Fashion Institute of Technology, as well as digital storytelling, literary studies, and American Literature at Hunter College in New York City.