Kirsten Mickelwait is a longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a copywriter by day and a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction by night. She received a degree in English from UC Berkeley, where she expanded her love of James Joyce and the expatriate creatives of 1920s Paris-including Sara and Gerald Murphy. She is a repeat alumna of the Napa Valley Writers' Conference as well as the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, the Kauai Writers Conference, and the Paris Writers' Conference. Her memoir, The Ghost Marriage, was published in 2021; The Ashtrays Are Full and the Glasses Are Empty is her debut novel.