Nova Ren Suma
(she/her/hers)
Office Hours
spring 2023Virtual office hours by appointment in Zoom on Tuesdays and/or Thursdays. Schedule via Calendly.
Nova Ren Suma is a two-time Edgar Award finalist and the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling The Walls Around Us. She also wrote the YA novels Imaginary Girls and 17 & Gone, as well as the middle-grade novel Dani Noir, which was reissued for the YA shelves under the title Fade Out. Her latest novel, A Room Away from the Wolves, was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and praised as “shiver-inducingly delicious” by The New York Times. She has contributed to the short story anthologies Slasher Girls & Monster Boys, Toil & Trouble, and It’s a Whole Spiel: Love, Latkes, and Other Jewish Stories and published an essay in Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World. She was co-editor of Foreshadow: Stories to Celebrate Magic of Reading and Writing YA, a short story and craft anthology published by Algonquin Young Readers. Nova’s next novel is also forthcoming from Algonquin.
Nova has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and has been awarded fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the Millay Colony. Before teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, she was core faculty in the Writing for Children & Young Adults MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and taught creative writing at Columbia University and Arizona State University. She's led novel-writing workshops all over the country, in person and virtually, including at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Highlights Foundation, Blue Stoop, the Writing Barn, the Tin House YA Fiction Workshop, and Fine Arts Work Center/24PearlStreet. She lives in Philadelphia.