Veronica Zora Kirin
is a queer Croatian/American writer currently living in Berlin. She is the author of “Stories of Elders: What the Greatest Generation Knows about Technology that You Don’t,” which documents the high-tech revolution as lived by the Greatest Generation. It received the National Indie Excellence Award and was a finalist for the International Book Award. The eponymous documentary was a finalist at the Lift Off Film Festival. Kirin is cofounder of Anodyne Magazine, an arts and literature journal featuring FLINTA* health. Her short stories, poetry, and essays have been published in the New Feather Anthology, Unburied Anthology, Scare Street, Scars, and elsewhere. She is currently working on her debut novel.
Stories of Elders
2018 | Identity Publications
Winner of the National Indie Excellence Award 2020
Finalist for the International Book Awards 2020
How has the high-tech revolution changed America? In Stories of Elders, author and anthropologist Veronica Kirin answers these questions and more through interviews with 100 members of the Greatest Generation. From medicine to community, Stories of Elders provides insight to tech’s effects on all of us and provides age-old advice for today’s burning question: is technology good or bad, and how should we handle it?
Stories of COVID
In Data Analysis
We are living through the most disruptive event of our era, and technology is playing a pivotal role in our ability to adapt and manage its effects. I am interviewing people worldwide throughout the entirety of the pandemic to write a book encapsulating this human experience.
Watch the TEDx Talk | Recipient of the Bounce Back Award | LEARN MORE
Published Poems, Short Stories, & Essays
On Depression and the Effects of Toxic Positivity in Entrepreneurship [essay]
Adelaide 2023
There is a sense that a positive mindset and long hours are the key to business success. What of the herculean feat that we entrepreneurs who struggle with mental health undertake each day to steer our businesses and serve our customers? We chose entrepreneurship to protect ourselves from the mandatory 9-5 hours and hard deadlines of corporate jobs. Yet, our efforts are not reflected in the toxic positivity published in popular business magazines such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Inc. It’s time that this side of entrepreneurship sees the light.
Heaps of Home (for Berlin) [poem]
Immigrant Diaries 2023
Moving abroad is like hope in the dark. One can have all the data, but that rarely translates to true knowledge of a place’s potential for home. We leaped toward Berlin blindly, armed only with a job offer, and were delighted to discover a city that felt tailor-made to our sense of security, community, and home.
Of Darkness And Doughnuts [short story]
Scare Street 2021
How does one know they are going mad? What in our surroundings tells us we are rational? In this short story, we get to know a young person who has always been afraid of the dark and chooses to conquer that fear. Their journey takes them down a path of the weird and unexpected, including appeasing the darkness with doughnuts. Throughout the story, the reader begins to question what is real and what takes place in the mind.
1,000 Tiny Cuts [short story]
Unburied 2021
After a woman marries and begins to build a family with an elegant woman who seems totally out of her league, she discovers that what the new wife wants most isn’t domestic bliss but utter control, and she will learn just how far her wife will go to maintain it.
First Grey [essay]
Down in the Dirt 2021
I had a bit of a shock early in the pandemic. A rite of passage thrust upon me before I had planned. The two events mirrored each other — as the pandemic has shown in stark reality, our best-laid plans rarely go off without a hitch.
Elephantalism [flash fiction]
BluePepper 2021
I had a dream last night that the circus had come to town. Before our eyes, we witnessed an elephant herd created by an unknown force of power held by the ringmaster. Though he had the power to create, he did not possess the power of life. Best read out loud to hear the rhythm of the train and time.
Halt [poem]
The Poetry Archive 2020
Downtime. Relaxation. Taking a break. Sometimes a pause is healthy. But when thrust upon us with no end in sight, one becomes weary, tense, and unsure. When the whole world is faced with the same forced interruption, that tension grows into something else entirely.
Quicksand [poem]
New Feathers Anthology 2020
What if worldwide upheaval is actually a goodness? That in the shifting tide we might build a path toward something new and better, if only we seize the opportunity?
The Untold Stories Project [essay]
HerStry 2016
A reflection on my nation-wide journey to interview our elders for my upcoming book, Stories of Elders.
