"After reading The Dirt, Nance Van Winckel's second book of poetry, I had the feeling that I was standing on the cusp of the poems and would not be allowed access to their meanings until I had read the book several more times... What makes so many of the poems so good is the elegant language and imagery that made me want to reread them, to understand each poem on its own terms."  --Laurie Byrne Bouck in Indiana Review

"Van Winckel's angels are those of experience, of a life lived in a world populated by the strange and sordid, the supremely fictional and the shockingly real: bizarre relatives of mythic proportions, criminal friends shuffled off to lengthy prison sentences, tragic lovers and their selfish needs, seductive strippers in the dance of provocation. These people and others blossom to vivid life in memory's fertile dirt."  --High Plains Literary Review

"[The] slide into and away from violence energizes her work. . . . Like Rilke, she is a poet trying to leave the cerebral behind her in order to move into a more spiritual realm via the senses."  --Laurie Byrne Bouck for Indiana Review

"Like all successful spell casters, Nance Van Winckel knows just what to offer, just what to withhold. And through these assured, finely crafted poems, we follow her brilliant summons into all the worlds of 'after-ing': desire, pursuit, the shaping of time..."  --Linda Bierds

"There is so much unpredictability and surprise in Nance Van Winckel's poems that they seem to hover, sometimes tremble, slightly ahead of the reader and writer, yet all the while rewarding anyone who cares to follow."  --Li-Young Lee

In addition to her two most recent poetry books with Miami University Press, Nance Van Winckel authored an earlier volume of verse, Bad Girl, with Hawk. Her poems have appeared in APR, Ohio Review, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, and North American Review.

She has also published two collections of short stories, Limited Lifetime Warranty and Quake, both with the University of Missouri Press. A third book of fiction will be out in spring 2000 with Persea Books.

She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship in poetry and a 1998 Washington State Artists Trust Literary Award in fiction.

She is a professor in the graduate creative writing program at Eastern Washington University in Spokane, WA.