Meet Mira

Mira Ptacin is a literary journalist, memoirist, New York Times–bestselling ghostwriter, editor, and professor of creative writing. She is the author of the award-winning memoir Poor Your Soul (Soho Press, 2016), named a Best Memoir of the Year by Kirkus Reviews as well as the Junior Library Guild Selection of the Year; and The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna (Liveright–W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), a genre-blending work of feminist history, memoir, and ethnography, which the New York Times praised as ideal pandemic reading. She earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she served as editor-at-large of the literary magazine LUMINA. For over a decade, she has taught memoir and nonfiction writing in both traditional and nontraditional spaces, including inside prisons, where she leads long-running writing programs for incarcerated women. 

A first-generation, proudly Polish-American daughter of an immigrant, Mira writes at the intersection of the intimate and the systemic. Her work is driven by a devotion to telling deeply human stories that challenge prevailing ideas about equity, compassion, responsibility, and the systems that govern our lives in Maine and beyond. With an unwavering commitment to activism, she uncovers the complexities behind headlines and amplifies voices often overlooked by mainstream narratives, always in pursuit of justice and transcendence. Her reporting ranges from the lives of incarcerated women to rural Maine feminist mystics to neo-Nazis and the townspeople who drove them out. Ptacin serves on the board of Reentry Sisters, a Maine-based nonprofit supporting women transitioning from incarceration back into society. Mira is the 2025–2026 inaugural writer-in-residence at Mechanics’ Hall and a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Mira lives on Peaks Island, Maine, with her spouse, children, and animals, and is currently at work on her next book.