Micki Myers was born and raised in England in two very different places just an hour apart but a world away from each other. One was a flat in central London, and the other was a cottage in Berkshire. While the flat had everything you’d expect in terms of modern conveniences — electricity, running water, a bathroom, telephone, paved roads outside the door and a postal address — the cottage had none of these things. As such, it allowed her the unusual experience of living the way people did a century ago.

This idyllic upbringing made Micki into someone who prefers to make things from scratch using old-school skills and equipment, as well as being apt to see beneath the surface of things many take for granted about the world we live in. While her home life makes much use of the former, her artistic life explores the latter, in both written and visual imagery.

After studying graphic design at Central St. Martin’s School of Art, Micki moved to the United States, where she pursued writing degrees at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

Micki’s first book, Trigger Finger, won the Pearl Poetry Prize, and her work has received three Pushcart Prize nominations. Her second book of poetry, a memoir about breast cancer called It’s Probably Nothing... is being published by Simon & Schuster in 2013. She has been published widely in journals nationwide, is a regular book reviewer for The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, she ran two popular reading series in Pittsburgh, one of which, The Beehive, enabled students to read alongside their literary heroes.

Micki taught writing and literature at the university level for 17 years, as well as having worked for the fundraising wings of both CMU and Pitt as a writer, the latter specializing in medical writing. She has also managed a frame shop, gaining expertise in every aspect of archival picture framing and frame-making. Micki is the owner of Little Nest, a quilt and fabric arts company, and continues to paint, producing life-size portraits of fruit and vegetables in gouache. She enjoys photography and does professional re-touching work for photographers.

As someone who grows her own vegetables and herbs and loves cooking, Micki started the blog, Yuckylicious, which utilizes her large collection of horrible recipe books to explore the aesthetics of cookbook production. She also writes The Inky Jukebox blog which focuses on country music, another passion. Prior to this, she recreated Scott of the Antarctic’s famous journal as Scott’s Last Blog, as if he was blogging in real time from a century ago.

Micki is currently a freelance writer whose work regularly appears in a number of print and online magazines. She can be found wearing her favorite cowboy hat or tiara — depending on mood — singing loudly along to her favorite music and helping her two children, Lucia and Javier, to be as creative in the kitchen as they are on paper or in Lego or popsicle sticks.