Mieke Eerkens

Mieke Eerkens is a Dutch-American writer who grew up in Los Angeles and lives in Amsterdam. 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, 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. She earned an M.F.A. in Nonfiction Writing from The University of Iowa, and has taught Creative Writing for the University of Iowa, UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, Amsterdam University and Leiden University in The Netherlands. She currently teaches for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and private workshops, and is working on a memoir about her younger years traveling with the circus. Mieke’s essay ‘You Are Something: “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”’ appears in Nothing Compares To You: What Sinéad O’Connor Means To Us (edited by Sonya Huber and Martha Bayne) which is published by Atria/One Signal Publishers in July 2025.