With more than a half a million pet books in print and hundreds of articles on pets and their care and training to her credit, Nikki Moustaki is considered one of the country's leading pet experts. She also is an award winning freelance writer, animal trainer, and pet industry expert, and her tireless work feeding shelter pets with her innovative website, The Pet Postcard Project, along with her hands-on rescue efforts and vocal advocacy for homeless animals has led her to be dubbed "Saint Nik."
Nikki Moustaki is also considered an "Urban Dog Guru," specializing in training city dogs for their particular needs. She has published more than 42 books of nonfiction, primarily on the care and training of pets. Her pet books and articles have been translated into 5 languages. Along with working as a dog trainer, Nikki is one of the country's foremost experts on parrots, having authored more than 24 books on birds and their care and training. Her expertise in pets ranges from dogs and cats to fish and hermit crabs, and everything else in between.
An energetic, lively and personable TV and radio guest, Nikki currently hosts a pet-related cable show on The Beach Channel in Miami Beach, and she hosted, co-produced, and co-wrote the national NBC/MSN show, The Celebrity Pet Dish, with her Miniature Schnauzer, Pepper, as her co-host. Nikki has appeared on CNN, Howard Stern (XM Sirius Radio), NBC News, ABC News, Inside Edition, South Florida Live, Inside South Florida, FOX News, CBS News, Martha Stewart Radio, BBC Radio, Animal Radio, Pet Talk Radio, Dog Cast Radio, Bloomdaddy Radio, and Talkin' Pets Radio, among others, and was the animal handler for the second season of the Tony Danza Show, where she often appeared on-air along with her parrot and dog. Nikki has also been featured in The New York Times, The New York Post, Glamour Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, The Humane Society Magazine, and Dog Fancy, among others. She is also a regularly featured expert trainer on video on TeddyHilton.com and writes a weekly blog for DogChannel.com called MUTTerings.
Nikki also writes, collaborates and co-writes books on a variety of topics. She also created a canine focused blues album, Dog Training Tracks: A Musical No Bark Solution: Blues for Buster, for "alarm barkers" and dogs who suffer from separation anxiety.
A self-professed "pet product geek," Nikki also enjoys working as a consultant for pet product manufacturers, helping them brand, position, and develop their products and succeed in social media. She has worked on projects ranging from microchips to dog toys to pet food research and development. Her many years of expertise with pet products at both the consumer and the trade level give her unique insight, and she is able to communicate about pets and pet products in any medium.
Nikki's two primary interests – writing and animals – collide in her work, allowing her to travel through both the landscape of the literary writer and the interesting world of the pet industry. She writes feature articles for many pet-related magazines, including Dog Fancy, Popular Dogs, Dogs USA, CATS Magazine, Cat Fancy, Pet Product News, Bird Talk, Birds USA, and Water Garden News, among others. Nikki has written for Latina Magazine, the Village Voice, Jane, Time To Spa Magazine, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Magazine.
Her popular websites include The Pet Postcard Project, a fun and charitable site that raises awareness, food, and funds for shelter animals, and has raised over 120,000,000 pieces of kibble for shelter pets. The site has no advertising - all of her efforts are to help feed the homeless pets. Her Pepper in Paris website attracts visitors from all over the world to read Pepper’s own blog of his trip through Europe.
Nikki holds an M.A. in creative writing from New York University, an M.F.A. in creative writing from Indiana University, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from NYU. She taught creative writing at several universities for 10 years, including both NYU and IU, as well as at The New School in New York City. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry, and has been awarded many national prizes and honors for her writing, including two Pushcart Press nominations, and her poetry and essays have also appeared in various anthologies and college textbooks, including Poetry After 9-11: An Anthology of New York Poets, and America Now, chosen by Robert Atwan, editor of the Best American Essays series.
Before beginning her career as a freelance writer and editor, Nikki worked as an acquisitions and development editor at Macmillan Publishing and IDG Books Worldwide, Inc., where she specialized in the non-fiction market and edited more than 60 non-fiction titles. Nikki splits her time between New York City and Miami Beach with her two rescued Schnauzers, Pepper and Zoey, one rescued Schnoodle named Pearl, and two parrots. When she’s not writing, you can find Nikki rocking out on the drums, teaching herself 80s metal on her Gibson guitar, rescuing dogs from the shelter, and working on her various charity projects.
