Author. Essayist. Teacher. Explorer of Ice & Memory.

Lisa Nikolidakis is an award-winning professor of English and Creative Writing whose work spans memoir, fiction, and hybrid forms. She is the author of No One Crosses the Wolf (2022), a memoir praised for its clarity, courage, and lyricism. Her essays and short stories appear widely, and she teaches creative writing at a university in Texas.

Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, Los Angeles Review, Orion, LitHub, Hunger Mountain, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Salt Hill, The Rumpus, Nimrod, Gulf Coast Online, and many other publications.

Her writing has received numerous prizes and honors, including the Annie Dillard Prize for Creative Nonfiction, Gulf Coast Prize, Indiana Review Fiction Prize, the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, the Calvino Prize, A Room of Her Own’s Orlando Prize, Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Prose, Hunger Mountain’s Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize, The Briar Cliff Review’s Annual Nonfiction Contest, and The Chattahoochee Review’s Lamar York Prize. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University.

Her current projects include a short story collection about Greek diaspora, an essay collection rooted in Icelandic landscapes and cultural histories, and a hybrid book exploring the intersections of mental illness, art-making, and survival.

She also works as a photographer, and her current practice explores landscape as a site of memory, instability, and narrative through a hybrid visual and literary approach. Her Icelandic landscape photography will be exhibited in 2026, and she will serve as an artist-in-residence in Iceland in June 2027.

She is available for public speaking, workshops, and interdisciplinary collaborations.

She is represented by Rayhané Sanders at Massie & McQuilkin (rayhane@mmqlit.com).