About the Author
Caitlin Myer grew up in a half-finished mountainside house in Provo, Utah, the youngest of a chaotic family of six children, a poet mother, and an artist father. A lust to go as far and as fast as possible was born when she was nine years old and her father directed a six-month study abroad in France. She was a kid from the righteous nucleus of Mormonia, dropped into the middle of Paris with only a few words of French, a metro card, and vague directions for finding her way home. She fell in love and never recovered.
Myer left home and Mormonism at sixteen, returned at eighteen, left the church again at twenty, and moved away from Utah for good at twenty-two.
Photo credit: Ian Tuttle
In 2009, Myer founded the San Francisco literary reading series Portuguese Artists Colony and its publishing spinoff, PACBooks, where she served as editor. She emceed most of the Colony’s shows and performed at other literary events such as Litquake, Literary Death Match, Writers With Drinks, Why There Are Words, and Quiet Lightning.
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In 2011, Myer attended the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon on a scholarship. While there, she hosted a Portuguese Artists Colony reading in the historic Grémio Literário, 150-year-old literary club that did not admit women until the Carnation Revolution in 1974. In the same year, she participated in the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop with a George Pascoe Miller Scholarship. In the spring of 2012, Myer completed a residency at MacDowell Colony, where she was recipient of a fellowship from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her memoir/essays “Positive I Don't Have a Uterus” and “Unforgettable: Becoming an Amnesiac’s Memory” were published in The Butter and Electric Literature, respectively. Her short story “Everything a Woman Should Have” appeared in Cultural Weekly, the poem “Bus Story” in No Tokens, and the story “God Time” in Joyland. Other short stories, poems, and essays have been published in literary magazines, online journals and anthologies.
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She has appeared in storytelling series such as Porchlight and The Moth, and was featured on NPR's The Moth Radio Hour with her real-life story, “Near Mrs.” She has also been featured in podcasts, including Nocturne. These performances have won her fans around the world, from India to Portugal to New Orleans.
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For seven years, Myer has lived out of a suitcase, but she now has a lease on a 400-year-old apartment in the north of Portugal. At least once a week, she climbs the hill to what was once a 12th century Augustinian monastery, and writes.
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