Mira Ptacin

I’m a Brooklyn-based creative nonfiction and children’s book writer, as well as the founder and host of Freerange, a successful nonfiction reading series located in the heart of New York City that brings together up-and-coming and established writers on one small stage to share their work with the rest of the world.

My writing has appeared in numerous print and online publications, such as The Morning News, Anderbo, Cerise Press, LUMINA, Epiphany, SMITH Magazine, Nerve.com, the Citron Review, CommonDreams.org, Truthout.org and more. I’m a contributing writer to the forthcoming book, The Moment (2011 Harper Perennial) and I recently ghostwrote a children’s book, which will be published in 2011. This year, I was nominated for the 2011 Best American Essays as well as the 2011 Pushcart Prize.

Here’s a bit more about me: I was born in 1979 in Battle Creek, Michigan, a small city in the southwestern part of the Michigan mitten where a certain Dr. John Harvey Kellogg invented cornflakes and turned the city into the cereal capital of the world. 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 also fell in love with the state of Maine while I was at it. I hold a 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 also led creative writing workshops at the Valhalla Women’s Correctional Facility, and am a former writer-in-residence at the Bronx Academy of Letters.

For the time being, I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with my very patient and loving husband Andrew and our two goofy dogs, Huckleberry and Maybe. I’m currently working on a memoir about grief, the uterus, and the American Dream, as well as a collection of short stories for children. Also, I’m a vegetarian.