Mira Ptacin

2025 Nonfiction Craft Lab 

Mira Ptacin is a Maine-based award-winning creative nonfiction writer, memoirist, and New York Times bestselling ghostwriter. She's the author of the memoir Poor Your Soul (Soho Press 2016) as well as the feminist history “The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna”.

Mira's work frequently appears or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, Literary Hub, Guernica, New York Magazine, Tin House, Vice, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Poets & Writers, Slice Magazine, Down East, and more. Her stories have been featured in "The Moment: Wild, Poignant, Life-Changing Stories from 125 Writers and Artists Famous & Obscure"; Get Out: Twenty-One Writers Respond to America’s War on Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health, and the anthology "Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NYC". Mira was the recipient of the Maine Literary Award in both 2014 and 2017, and her first book was praised by Kirkus Books as one of the best books of 2016.  

Mira has 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, Maine's Stonecoast MFA program, The Maine College of Art and Design, the University of New Hampshire's MFA programs, and most recently, was a visiting professor of creative nonfiction and memoir at Colby College and memoir writing for incarcerated women at the Maine Correctional Center. She is also the founder of Freerange Nonfiction, a Manhattan reading series and storytelling collective praised by CBS as one of the “Five Best Things To Do in New York”, selected by New York Magazine as a “Critic’s Pick. Mira lives in Peaks Island, Maine and is currently at work on her third book of creative nonfiction.