A Rhode Islander by birth, as a girl Nancy Coggeshall began writing long letters to penpals in Finland, Scotland, and Jamaica. At the University of Rhode Island, she studied with Nancy Potter (We Have Seen the Best of Our Times and Legacies) and later taught high school English in Toronto.
During a two-year stint in London she worked as a research assistant at the British Museum, then as an editorial assistant for Ward Lock Publishing and a book publicist for Oak Tree Press, an American company distributed by Ward Lock. While there she traveled by car from London to Sweden and Finland: through western Russia, the former USSR; then to Poland, the former German Democratic Republic, and what was Czechoslovakia, on to Austria, Belgium, and back to England. She had tea at the Dorchester with the Cultural Attaché to the Iranian Embassy. And behind the cages at the London Zoo the director of the London Zoo yearbook personally introduced her to the orangutan that had widdled on the late Duke of Edinburgh at a Royal Conservation Society banquet.
Freelancing from rural Quebec in the 1970s, she became a contributing writer to Harrowsmith, then Canada’s third largest magazine. She interviewed Bertie Hill, Princess Anne’s coach for Britain’s Combined Event team at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. Two of her articles were anthologized in the Harrowsmith Reader, and in 1978 she won a Writer’s Digest prize for her profile of Australia’s 1976-Olympic show-jumping equestrian, Kevin Bacon.
Returning to Rhode Island after living out of the country for fifteen years, she wrote chiefly for horse magazines. She studied with Jincy Willett (Jenny and the Jaws of Life and The Winner of the National Book Award) in creative writing classes at Brown University. In New Mexico her writing has consisted chiefly of book reviews, along with feature articles and promotional pieces. She wrote Gila Country Legend: The Life and Times of Quentin Hulse, which was published in 2009. It won the New Mexico Book Association’s Award for First Book in 2010.
She has lived in Chicago, Toronto, London, and Albuquerque: New England, New France, and what once was New Spain, now New Mexico, have been her home. She presently resides in New Mexico’s southwest quadrant, where she is working on a food memoir, tentatively titled “Moveable Feasts: Here, There, and Yonder.”