Forget the usual stories about a gorgeous campus. The story of how Nicole Zelniker ’17 ended up at Guilford is not one of postcard beauty but rather random chance. Nicole was flipping through one of those massive college catalog books when she was a high school senior living in New York when fingers stopped on a page about a small Quaker college in North Carolina, a state she’d never visited.
“I know it sounds insane, but I had no idea where I wanted to go – I just knew I wanted to get away from New York,” says Nicole. “When I read about Guilford, I liked the idea of a school that’s community oriented, where everyone knew everyone and looked after each other. I guess I was lucky I stopped on that page.”
If chance brought Nicole to Guilford, there was no doubt about her path afterwards. An English major who was as an editor and writer at The Guilfordian, she is a prolific author – six books and counting since graduation with two more in waiting next year. Her most recent book, From Where We Are, was released in May and tells a painful, sometimes graphic story of a Jewish family’s multi-generational struggles with mental health, discrimination marginalized groups and state-sanctioned violence.
Nicole will be at Scuppernong Books in Greensboro on Saturday, June 22, at 6 pm to read from her latest book. Like so many other authors, she draws on her own family – and herself – for her work but allows her imagination to branch out from the original story.
“I start writing from my own experience, and then start thinking about, ‘oh, but what if this happened to this character and thinking about that this would be really cool to set in this time period,’” says Nicole, who lives and writes in Chapel Hill. “So I think it starts very much with my own experiences and then becomes more the deeper I get into the story.”
Nicole found the support for her writing at Guilford taking writing classes from Associate Professor of English emerita Myléne Dressler, Lincoln Financial Professor of English Professor Diya Abdo and the late Dana Professor of English Jeff Jeske, who also served as advisor to The Guilfordian.
“I had never done journalistic writing before Guilford and I was really bad,” says Nicole. “But Jeff kept supporting me and I kept going until I got it. You could say that about all my professors, really. They kept supporting me and I got better.”
