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Nicole Blades

2015 Speaker

NICOLE BLADES has been putting her imagined worlds on paper since third grade as this curious kid growing up in Montreal. That curiosity landed her in New York City after university, working as an intern at “The Sally Jessy Raphael Show.” From there she became a working journalist for the next 18 years, first as an editorial assistant at Essence, and later an editor at ESPN.com and senior editor at Women’s Health. She even joined the dot-com boom in the middle of all this, co-founding an online magazine for savvy young women called SheNetworks. Blades has written about race, motherhood, family, identity and reinvention for publications such as MORE, Women’s Health, Cosmopolitan, NYTimes.com, WashingtonPost.com and BuzzFeed. She’s also the family editor for BlogHer.com and an editor at the tech and style site Cool Mom Tech. Her debut novel, “EARTH’S WATERS” was published in 2007 (DC Books). She recently landed a two-book deal with Kensington, and her next novel, “THE THUNDER BENEATH US,” will be published in Fall 2016. @nicoleblades