The author and friends at dinner.
Nina Sabak is a Pittsburgh-based writer whose first home was, and always will be, West Virginia. She received her BA (2013) and MFA (2016) from the University of Pittsburgh, where she was fiction editor and co-editor-in-chief of Hot Metal Bridge Literary Magazine. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Gravel Magazine, grlhood, The Rumpus, Bartleby Snopes, Three Rivers Review, Plain China, and in her debut chapbook, Naming the Mountain.
After years in the NYC publishing industry, she now works in the Pittsburgh nonprofit scene. She lives with her husband and their menagerie (two cats, one skink), as well as about a thousand books and an improbable number of plastic skeletons.
As an anxious middle-schooler she had a run of glory as Marion County Spelling Bee Champion. Everything since has been an effort to recapture the fleeting high of getting "pneumonia" right in front of a crowd of strangers.