Profiles

Nina Li Coomes

Lecturer

Nina Li Coomes is a Japanese and American writer. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Guernica and Catapult, among other places. In 2018 she was an Aspen Summer Words Fellow in Memoir, in 2019 a Tin House Scholar, and in 2022 was awarded a residency at Hedgebrook. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a Chicago Review of Books Award, and was listed as a Notable Mention in Best American Travel Writing 2020. In 2022, her essay on ramen and silent dining was included by Sohla El-Waylly in Best American Food Writing.

Teaching Philosophy:

I believe that the sacred duty of every instructor is to help each student protect the flame of creativity that lives inside of them. In practice, this means I care about generative exercises and going out into our world and community to look for moments of creative collaboration. Anchoring these exploratory, hands-on experiences is a rich shared vocabulary of work by diverse writers. Said plainly, my focus is on reading and writing together, expanding our sense of what is possible in this world by making more possible on the page.

Education

MFA + MA, Northwestern University, Litowitz MFA + MA
BA, University of Chicago

Research Interests

Contemporary Asian American literature; multi-genre writing; archival research methods; food writing; animal studies; U.S.-Japan relations; cultural criticism; multilingual writing; speculative literature; climate writing