Savala Nolan

Board Member

Alum 2020 | Board

Savala Nolan is the author of Good Woman: A Reckoning (HarperCollins), named a Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2026 by Ms. Magazine, and Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body (Simon & Schuster), which was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and praised by The New York Times as “a standout collection.” She is the Executive Director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley's School of Law.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Harper's Magazine, NPR, Time, Poets & Writers, Essence, and elsewhere. She was also part of the Peabody Award-winning team behind the podcast The Promise.

For more than a decade, Savala has taught classes on writing and classes on the law at the university and MFA level, including at the University of California and in graduate writing programs across the country. Most recently, she taught memoir at Writing A Life, a 2026 workshop hosted by Roxane Gay.

Savala works privately with a small number of creative nonfiction writers, coaching them on craft from sentence-level refinement to big-picture questions of structure, voice, vulnerability, and truth-telling. In 2025, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights awarded Nolan the MLK Living the Dream Award. Learn more about Savala here.