Nicola Mason was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and grew up along the southern East Coast. She attended Mary Washington College and then Louisiana State University, where she received her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1994. For a number of years she created ceramic sculpture and wrote fiction, publishing stories in national literary journals and anthologies, while working as an editor for The Southern Review and Louisiana State University Press. She was awarded an NEA fellowship in 2000. Upon moving to Cincinnati in 2001, she began taking courses in the DAAP (Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning) program at the University of Cincinnati, and was soon experimenting with mixed-media flatwork and assemblages. In 2003 she started The Cincinnati Review, a journal of the literary and the visual arts (www.cincinnatireview.com), an outgrowth of the creative writing Ph.D. program at the University, and is presently its managing editor. Her mixed-media work has been accepted for numerous international juried exhibitions and is continually on display at Cluxton Alley Coffee Roasters (cluxtonalleyroasters.com) in Northside. Her husband is the novelist Michael Griffith.