Vicki Valosik

At Johns Hopkins, Vicki Valosik serves as a lecturer in the MA in Writing program.

A nonfiction writer, editor, and instructor whose work blends cultural history, reporting, and narrative storytelling, she is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing program and holds an additional MA in Sociology from the University of South Alabama. She is a former fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Valosik is the author of Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water (W. W. Norton, 2024), a narrative history that traces the cultural, social, and political significance of women’s aquatic performance from the nineteenth century to the present. Swimming Pretty was selected as an NPR Books We Love 2024 Staff Pick and named an Amazon Editors’ Choice for Best History Books. It has received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Booklist and has been covered in major outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as reviewed in scholarly journals such as the Journal of Sports History.

Her essays and reported features have appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, TIME, Slate, The American Scholar, Lit Hub, The Washington Post Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. In addition to her teaching at Georgetown, where she has served since 2015 as an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and works with students on research-based, public-facing, and professional writing, Valosik has been invited to guest lecture and lead writing workshops for universities, literary programs, and cultural institutions in the United States and abroad.