Nicole Tsuno, MFA

Nicole Tsuno is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Creative Writing at William & Mary, where she teaches fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. She is currently querying her debut novel. Her special interests include chronic illness and disability, frame and unreliable narration, metafiction, speculative fiction, the novella, and unconventional forms. Before that, she taught at Johns Hopkins University for three years where she earned her M.F.A. in fiction in 2024. During her M.F.A., she also worked as a research assistant in the Chen Lab within Hopkins’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and is still involved in studies that use fiction stimuli to study memory.

Nicole is described as excitable, and her teaching style as breathless. She is passionate about individualized and accessible teaching; she is known among her students for teaching fiction concepts through popular TV shows. She has over eleven years of experience tutoring and teaching. Outside of university-level creative writing, she has taught SAT prep, college essays, history, English, and government.

She grew up in the Bay Area of California but was attracted to the very (!) cold state of Michigan by the lure of marching band. In 2019, she received her B.A. in political science from the University of Michigan, where she worked in legal aid, focusing on humanitarian asylum immigration and domestic violence family law.