Bio
Hello there. My name is Mira and I love stories. I’m a Maine-based creative nonfiction and children’s book author, New York Times bestselling ghostwriter, as well as the founder and executive director of Freerange Nonfiction, a New York City reading series and storytelling collective. My compositions have appeared or are forthcoming in New York Magazine, NPR, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Rumpus, Guernica, Writers’ Houses, The Morning News, Smith Magazine, Anderbo, Nerve.com, Cerise Press, Epiphany Literary Magazine, Common Dreams, LUMINA, and more. I’m a contributing writer to THE MOMENT: Wild, Poignant, Life-Changing Stories from 125 Writers and Artists Famous & Obscure (HarperPerrenial 2012), GET OUT (Cherry Bomb Books 2013), and Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York (Seal Press 2013). I’m recently completed a memoir about the uterus and the American Dream (stay tuned!).
I was born and raised by two freerange-thinking parents in Battle Creek, a small city in the southwestern part of the Michigan mitten where a certain Dr. John Harvey Kellogg invented cornflakes. After Michigan, I embarked on a dig in Mongolia to pursue archaeology, but soon learned that I’d much rather write about the living than the dead. After Mongolia, I headed to Maine to study at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, where I produced and published “Working for the Living”, a written documentary about the life of family-run funeral homes.
I earned my Masters of Fine Arts in Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and I’m the former editor-at-large of their literary magazine, LUMINA. I’ve led creative writing workshops at the Valhalla Women’s Correctional Facility, was a writer-in-residence at the Bronx Academy of Letters, served as guest faculty at Sarah Lawrence College’s Summer Writers Seminar for adults, and taught writing at CUNY-York College in Jamaica, Queens. I currently teach nonfiction writing at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine. And I live on Peaks Island, Maine, with my husband Andrew Jackson (like the president, yes,) and our two dogs, Maybe and Huckleberry, and we’re expecting a baby boy on June 24, 2013.
