UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL WITH QUEER AUTHOR MARISSA ALMA NICK

BY MONA ELYAFI

Rebel In Venus takes place over one ‘girl’s night in’ spent between best friends, Maria and Layla. Over the course of the witty and unexpected evening, Layla’s memory is jolted, and her once carefully repressed past begins to return to her, triggering a sequence of events that ultimately jeopardizes Layla’s unconventional life. In REBEL IN VENUS, the bold, and sometimes brutally honest stories that unfold, are filled with sexual revelations, high-school humiliations, unwanted pregnancies, unwavering friendships, sex work, divorce, and loss. As the confessions unfold, Layla’s anguished past starts to crystallize and challenges the strength of her friendship with Maria, as well as Layla’s own life. Will Layla learn to save herself in time? Or will her past win over her ability to see a future?

Rebel in Venus is a book that illuminates queer experiences with an authentic perspective on emerging concerns including trauma, mental health, sexual assault, abuse culture, and gaslighting.

Marissa Alma Nick graduated from the New World School of the Arts, received her BFA from the University of South Florida, and was selected for the Creative Capital Continued Education Program (host: Miami Dade Department of Cultural Affairs). She’s moved to Los Angeles straight out of college, and signed to MSA dance agency where she worked as a freelance dancer in various music videos, commercials, tv shows, and movies. Then in 2012, Marissa moved back to Miami to start her own dance-theatre company Alma Dance Theater and became the founding artistic director for the festival: ScreenDance Miami. While in Miami she’s been an adjunct professor for the University of Miami’s Musical Theater Department and has produced, choreographed, and directed live shows for Art Basel Miami, Faena Miami, Tigertail Productions, Vizcaya Museum, Perez Art Museum, Showfields Miami, and Together Arts.

In 2018 Marissa began working on her most personal project: REBEL IN VENUS, inspired by her own awakening to her sexual trauma and the reckoning that came with it. REBEL IN VENUS is both a live show (that premiered in Miami in December 2019); and a novel, which she started writing in 2020 and is being publishing now.

We caught up with the renaissance woman to talk about her extraordinary journey leading to the release of her debut novel.