Nicole Rivera

Author bio:

After 12 year teaching Mathematics in a New York City public school, Nicole has found her way back to another creative passion of hers, writing. Whether it was writing short stories for school, creating serial bedtime stories for her little brother or the tomes upon tomes of poetry etched in journals throughout her life, Nicole had always enjoyed her playtime with words. In her classroom she created fantastic math-lands to bring the abstract to life for her math-phobes and helped her students express their understanding through journals, narrative writing and Mathematician's notebooks. It seemed, although she didn't realize it at the time, writing had remained a prominent part of her livelihood, even if her personal writing seemed to lie dormant.

When a rare disease (Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension) changed the course of Nicole's life in 2009, she had to make the difficult decision to leave the classroom to heal. Since 2010 that healing process has included blogging on The IH Brain Pain Blogs (co-author) and her own blog Rivera Runs Through It, where she hosted her own "What if" writing prompts every week, participates in the Write On Edge writing prompts and shares her learning day by day. In 2012 Nicole also became part of the StoryDam writing community as well as a staff writer for Word of the Nerd Online.

2011 was Nicole's first ever participation in NaNoWriMo. Having found out about it while waiting in yet another doctor's office for follow up after follow up, after spending hours reading Stephen King's On Writing, she said, "Why not? I've got nothing to lose!" and felt that it was somehow meant to be.

Nicole completed her first draft of "Dear 302" in November 2011. As a first ever novel, she is proud of the effort and learn a tremendous amount from the experience. She enters into NaNoWriMo with a new appreciation of the writing process and looks forward to seeing how a year of editing and rewriting will change her approach to the challenge before her!