Veronica Zora Kirin
is a queer Croatian/American writer who loves to challenge the status quo and an Anthropologist who studies paradigm shifts. 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, and her findings were presented on the TEDxMacatawa stage.
Kirin’s current study documents the pandemic paradigm shift in real time through 214 interviews across 42 countries. It won the “Bounce Back Award” in 2020 and was presented on the TEDxTemecula stage.
Kirin is cofounder of Anodyne Magazine, an arts and literature journal that publishes creative work on the topic of FLINTA* health. Her short stories, poetry, and essays have been published in Adelaide, New Feather, Unburied Anthology, Scare Street, Down in the Dirt, and elsewhere. She is the recpient of the IFF’24 fiction award and is currently working on her debut memoir about entrepreneurship with a chronic condition.
Kirin writes freelance for Onchain Foundation.
Web3 women cringe as male counterparts cheer Trump [article]
Maddyness 2025
Following Trump’s reelection to the U.S. presidency in 2024, the crypto world exploded in celebration. Crypto bros across networks, primarily on Twitter but also on Telegram and Warpcast, celebrated the impending boon to their portfolios. The market equally reacted positively, with the crypto market cap growing by $1T in the days following the election.
All the while, women in crypto (only 27% of the sector) quietly cringed. While crypto bros celebrated, women and minorities in the U.S. and around the world feared for their personal rights. A growth in portfolio is nothing in the face of the loss of one’s human rights. The dissonance is palpable and hasn’t slowed.
This article calls readers to check their privilege, center minority voices in crypto, and explore how their access to power can be leveraged to support peers who are threatened. I will include quotes from fellow women in crypto (U.S.-based and abroad) to give a well-rounded perspective to all readers.
The Culture Shock of Moving to Berlin [article]
Business Insider 2025
On inauguration day 2021, my partner and I moved to Berlin after only one month of planning. We’d previously spent a collective of two days in Berlin — that is, I’d spent two days in Berlin and my partner had never been to Europe. Still, we knew we needed to leave the United States. We firmly believed a better life was possible abroad.
What we weren’t prepared for: the culture shock. In this article I dig in to the hilarity that comes with moving to a new country and new culture (and how to take it in stride).
What I Learned From Telling Men When I Menstruate [essay]
Blanket Gravity Magazine 2025
Last year I decided to experiment: What if I was upfront when I was experiencing symptoms from my menstrual cycle? I suffer from premenstrual dysphoric disorder. As a result, my monthly cycle is accompanied by weeks of depression, brain fog, and difficulty communicating. This takes a toll when one’s entrepreneurial livelihood depends on the ongoing exchange of ideas, and hiding it is labor-intensive.
I’m the founder of Asterisk, a women’s non-reproductive health startup, where we recognize the need to stop hiding the reality of life in a female body. This made me an ideal guinea pig. So I braced myself for discomfort from male colleagues and was shocked when my experience was wholly different.
The Pill is Medicine. Period [essay]
See You Next Tuesday 2025
Imagine a medication that helps the symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis, Rheumatoid arthritis, migraines, and many other illnesses. Now imagine it’s one of the few medications banned by your workplace, which pays for your medical insurance, because they decided that they are ‘against’ this particular medication. This is the reality that millions of women around the world face due to the prejudice said medication carries because it is labeled “birth control.”
The U.S. Government accidentally launched a paradigm shift toward DeSoc [essay]
Maddyness 2025
I’m an anthropologist specializing in paradigm shifts. I watched keenly as the TikTok community went through the stages of grief, from bargaining by inviting each other to follow decentralized social media accounts to the spiteful flocking to Little Red Note (wholly owned by the CCP). Now, in the wake of the temporary shut off, I proceed to frame what will happen next and why it matters to the culture of social media.
The Wife [short story]
Wuri 2024
The Wife takes place in a dystopian post-feminist world in which women know their place and are delighted by it. Second place winner of the International Fiction Festival ’24 sponsored by Wuri.
It’s Not Us It’s You: Why Women Don’t Join Web3 [essay]
Maddyness 2024
I am no stranger to the tech bro culture and hustle attitudes enshrined in hackathons, startups, and Silicone Valley. It is a well-recognized issue. What is not well-recognized is that the issue carries over into Web3. Over and over I hear, ‘we want women and diversity in the industry — we’ve made it so easy, why aren’t they coming?’ This rhetoric blames those of us who have been disenfranchised for decades from the tech industry.
AppleWatch Ankle Notes [essay]
Author Magazine 2024
An unlikely writing device entered my life after a bout with COVID-19 motivated the purchase of some health tech. I look a fool using it, but writing knows no bounds of fashion or form. I hope you enjoy the piece and get some ideas of your own!
Woman [poem]
Voice & Verse Issue #77
I grew up being told what a woman was: she gives birth; she is a caretaker; she is soft, gentle, demure. I measured myself against this yardstick with curiosity and shame: I was rugged, got dirty, liked to explore and pushed the boundaries others tried to put upon me. That feisty child grew up into an anthropologist who learned that all boundaries and labels are arbitrary. I learned about the women warriors of Dahomey and the matriarchal government of the Iroquois. I learned that when someone tells me to be more ladylike it’s because they are afraid of the voice of women and are attempting to quash our cry. I learned that when someone says, “You are not a woman,” it is because they are grasping for control. What is a woman? That is up to us women to decide.
It Was Too Much Sex! How “Poor Things” Broke Male Minds. [essay]
See You Next Tuesday 2024
Bella Baxter was acting just like a young girl without the concept of societal restraint on her body. The language she uses to describe her early sexual experiences underscores this exploration. Women’s bodies are as sexually dynamic as men’s, in many ways more so. The criticism of the film’s depiction of female sexuality echoes the outrage Alfred Kinsey met when he published his book “Sexuality in the Human Female” — despite the applause received for his first book “Sexuality in the Human Male.”
The Covert Reality of LGBTQ+ Literary Discrimination [essay]
Zero Readers 2024
There’s a sense that the LGBTQ+ community has ‘arrived’ due to the many publications that highlight queer and BIPOC work. What I learned during this unfortunate experience is that there remains covert gatekeeping against diverse communities in the literary community. In this hybrid personal/critical essay, I explain the interaction I had with the editors, my search for fellow writers also experiencing discrimination, and the disconcerting reality of covert LGBTQ erasure in the literary world.
On Depression and the Effects of Toxic Positivity in Entrepreneurship [essay]
Adelaide 2023
Entrepreneurs are told 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.
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
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?
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?
Watch the Documentary | Watch the TEDx Talk | BUY ON AMAZON
