Nova Ren Suma

Life and career

Nova has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and a BA in writing and photography from Antioch College.

She was a fellow in fiction with the New York Foundation for the Arts, a MacDowell Fellow, a Yaddo Fellow, and has been awarded residencies at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, where she was awarded the Erik A. Takulan Memorial Endowed Fellowship, and the Millay Colony. She was selected to attend the 2012 Launch Pad Workshop, a NASA-funded astronomy workshop for writers, and was awarded an NEA fellowship for a residency at the Hambidge Center for Arts & Sciences.

She has a background in publishing and worked for years as a production editor and copy editor for children’s book publishers, including HarperCollins and Penguin. She was an assistant editor at Marvel Comics and an editorial & production associate at the small-press comics publisher RAW Books.

Now she teaches creative writing. She has taught YA novel writing at Columbia University, the Your Novel Year certificate program at Arizona State University, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Highlights Foundation, and the Writing Barn in Austin, Texas. She is now visiting faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts, in the Writing for Children & Young Adults low-residency MFA program.

Her short stories for adults have appeared in publications including Small Spiral Notebook, The New School’s LIT magazine, Orchid, Gulf Coast.

She grew up in small towns across the Hudson Valley and now lives in New York City.