Natalie Lima
Natalie Lima is a Cuban-Puerto Rican writer and creative writing professor at Butler University in Indianapolis. She was born in Miami on June 12, 1986, and grew up in Hialeah and Las Vegas in a mixed-race, working-class family. She was the first in her family to earn a college degree. Lima earned her BA from Northwestern University and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona.
Since 2022, she has taught creative writing at Butler University. Her fiction and nonfiction have earned recognition in Best American Essays (2019 and 2020) and she has been listed among Best Small Fictions. She has received fellowships and residencies from PEN America, Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the Mellon Foundation, and completed a Hedgebrook residency in 2020. Lima also served as a judge for the Ray Ventre Nonfiction Prize in 2021, and in 2023 Literary Hub recommended her for readers interested in online flash fiction.
Her work is influenced by Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Ottessa Moshfegh, Celeste Ng, Samantha Irby, Jaquira Díaz, and Michelle Tea. It has appeared in Longreads, Guernica, Brevity, The Offing, and Catapult, and in anthologies such as Sex and the Single Woman (2022) and Body Language (2022). Themes include women’s bodies, gender, sexuality, and personal experience. One notable essay, "Snowbound," draws on her life as a first-generation college student.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 11:03 (CET).