Author: Valerie Nieman Colander
Alternate names: Valerie Nieman
Born: July 6, 1955
Bio: Valerie Nieman is the author of a collection of short stories, Fidelities, from West Virginia University Press, featuring stories that first appeared in The Kenyon Review, Arts & Letters, West Branch, and other journals and anthologies. 
Her first novel, Neena Gathering, was a science fiction paperback that was translated for the Brazilian market. Her second novel, Survivors, was a story of family dysfunction in a Rust Belt town in the 1970s, and she recently completed Feral, a novel set in North Carolina.
A poetry collection, Wake Wake Wake, was published in 2006 by Press 53, including work published in two chapbooks, and in Blackbird, Poetry, New Letters, REDiViDER, and in numerous anthologies. 
A former newspaper reporter and editor, she continues to free lance articles on travel and sailing. She has received an NEA creative writing fellowship, two Elizabeth Simpson Smith prizes in fiction, and the Greg Grummer Prize in poetry.  A graduate of the M.F.A. program at Queens University of Charlotte, she teaches writing at N.C. A&T State University.