Mieke Eerkens is a Dutch-American writer who grew up in Los Angeles and The Netherlands. She earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Leiden in The Netherlands, and an M.F.A. in Nonfiction Writing from the top-ranked program at The University of Iowa, where she studied with writers such as Marilynne Robinson, Ethan Canin, John D'Agata, Geoff Dyer, Robin Hemley, and ZZ Packer, among others. 

 

Mieke has over a decade of experience teaching various forms of writing to students from every age group and skill level. She has taught young people in the Iowa Youth Writing Project,  has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Magid Center for Undergraduate Writing,  a  lecturer in Academic Writing at the University of Amsterdam and Creative Writing at Leiden University, an instructor for the  OLLI lifelong learning program, a volunteer instructor for veterans writing workshops, and currently teaches creative writing online for UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program in Los Angeles and Leiden University College in The Netherlands, in addition to yearly workshops at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. 

Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, Catapult, Los Angeles Review of Books,  Pank, Guernica, and Creative Nonfiction, among others. Her work has further been anthologized in Best Travel Writing 2011; Norton’s Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts; and A Book of Uncommon Prayer, selected as a “notable essay” in Best American Science and Nature Writing, and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. All Ships Follow Me, a book about her parents’ experiences in WWII and the inheritance of war trauma, was released in 2019 by Picador/Macmillan and translations in two countries. She's currently working on a second book.