Writing by Veronica Zora Kirin | Freelance Writer and Editor

Veronica Zora Kirin

is a queer Croatian-American writer and anthropologist who studies and writes about paradigm shifts. She’s the author of Stories of Elders, a National Indie Excellence Award winner and International Book Award finalist, which documents the high-tech revolution through interviews with the last analogue generation. Her research on paradigm shifts has been featured on the TEDxMacatawa and TEDxTemecula stages.

Veronica is cofounder of Anodyne Magazine, a multimedia journal advocating for FLINTA* health equity through art and storytelling. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Business Insider, See You Next Tuesday, Maddyness, and many others. She is the recipient of the IFF’24 Fiction Award, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Monarch Award nominee, and is an OpEd Project Ambassador.

Writer/Editor CV Web3 Articles

All 26 /Books 2 /Essays 15 /Flash Fiction 1 /Poetry 4 /Short Stories 4

Let’s agree to stop ‘keeping the peace’ this holiday season

2025 | Waging Nonviolence | Essay

The piece explores the fallout within my own family between those that are alt-right and those that are not as a model for the polarization and silence families across the U.S. are facing. As an anthropologist who studies cultural and political paradigm shifts, I’ve seen firsthand how ideology can fracture families. Pew, Brown, and others are finding that polarization is growing at unprecendeted rates. I argue it starts at home — and can be changed.

My essay is a personal reflection on how the criminal charges and broader political polarization have created silence, fear, and distance — and a call for Americans to resist ‘keeping the peace’ in the face of the -isms that often fly across family dinners. It also teases apart the systems of ideology, learned helplessness, and polarization.

Also syndicated to Daily Kos, Nation of Change, and ZNetwork.

Size Obsessed: On Western Medicine’s Obsession with Weight

2025 | See You Next Tuesday | Essay

We’re two authors—one fat, one thin—who have experienced radically different relationships with our bodies, yet found ourselves dismissed by the same medical system. We explore the shared trauma of medical and societal bias through contrasting lenses: one of us has been told she’s “too thin” for real illness, the other “too fat” for care. Both of us learned that size was the issue.

We weave together our parallel experiences with chronic illness, disordered eating, societal expectations, and the relentless performance of health. By holding space for two extremes of weight stigma—and acknowledging where they converge—we offer a nuanced, intersectional look at how women’s bodies are pathologized, punished, and policed, no matter where they fall on the scale, while also recognizing the use of ‘women’ in this piece reflects our own lived experiences and the way gendered medical bias often presents.

Your Impact Never Ends

2025 | Sixty Inches from Center | Essay

In the late teens I interviewed people born before 1945 about the high tech revolution with the aim of preserving that critical perspective. The book titled “Stories of Elders” came out in 2018. As a result, I interviewed some incredible Midwestern elders whose stories ought to remain part of the fabric of our lives. I’d like to return to the beautiful interviews I conducted with Harriet Berg of Wayne State University (Michigan) who launched the dance program at the school and was a patron of the Detroit Institute of the Arts; Penny Gardner, who helped found the Lesbian Connection (Lansing, Michigan) and was an active protestor for women’s and LGBTQ rights; and Ruth Harper, author and poet in Grand Rapids, Michigan. These women shaped the arts across Michigan — three cities with attention to three persuits, they were spicy, stubborn, and certain of the value of their work. In an era when queer and women’s rights are again in doubt, we can look to these three women for lessons on persuing the arts against adversity because they knew it was right for their communities.

The Wife

2025 | After Dinner Conversation | Short Story

Second Place Winner of IFF 2024
Reader-nominated for 'Best of' Anthology 2025
2026 Pushcart Prize Nominee

The Wife takes place in a dystopian post-feminist world in which women know their place and are delighted by it.

"I found the wife startling. It shocked me when Mrs. Roberts first found a secret message from her predecessor. 'Burn this.' I suddenly glimpsed that current of desperation and secrecy just beneath the surface of this world. Though the story was clearly an exaggerated example of patriarchy, a la Handmaid's Tale, it prompted me to think about sexism in our modern culture and the repression/resentment that exists because of it. As a male, I realized that I often don't think about this enough because I don't have to." — Reader Review

In The Afterlife

2025 | Liminal Madness | Short Story

An absurdist dystopian science fiction story in which ‘heaven’ turns out to be structured and organized like a government entity. We find high-tech being explained away, no trace of angels or gods, and menial tasks that somehow improve the soul. Is this ‘heaven’ real, or is something else at work?

What AI and Quicksand Have in Common

2025 | Phi/AI | Essay

In this essay, I explore why every generation reaches a threshold of discomfort with new technology — and what that means for our collective agency during times of rapid change. Drawing on my interviews with the last analogue generation and recent fieldwork in paradigm shifts, I argue that resistance may feel safe, but it can leave us voiceless during cultural transitions. Readers will get a roadmap for engaging with AI now, before the transition is complete.

Web3 women cringe as male counterparts cheer Trump

2025 | Maddyness | Essay

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.

The Culture Shock of Moving to Berlin

2025 | Business Insider | Essay

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).

Art by John Tricarico

What I Learned From Telling Men When I Menstruate

2025 | Blanket Gravity Magazine | Essay

Monarch Award Nominee

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 U.S. Government accidentally launched a paradigm shift toward DeSoc

2025 | Maddyness | Essay

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 Pill is Medicine. Period.

2025 | See You Next Tuesday | Essay

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.”

It’s Not Us It’s You: Why Women Don’t Join Web3

2024 | Maddyness | Essay

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

2024 | Author Magazine | Essay

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

2024 | Voice & Verse | Poem

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.

2024 | See You Next Tuesday | Essay

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

2024 | Zero Readers | Essay

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

2023 | Adelaide | Essay

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)

2023 | Immigrant Diaries | Poem

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

2021 | Scare Street | Short Story

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.

First Grey

2021 | Down in the Dirt | Essay

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.

1,000 Tiny Cuts

2021 | Unburied by AM Ink | Short Story

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. A sapphic horror story.

Elephantalism

2021 | BluePepper | Flash Fiction

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

2020 | The Poetry Archive | Poem

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

2020 | New Feathers Anthology | Poem

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 COVID

In Data Analysis | Publication TBD

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

Stories of Elders

2018 | Identity Publications | Book

Winner of the National Indie Excellence Award Finalist for the International Book Awards

What can the past teach us about the future of technology? In Stories of Elders, author and anthropologist Veronica Kirin answers these questions and more through interviews with 100 members of the last analogue 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 rapid technological development good or bad, and how should we handle it?

The Documentary | The TEDx Talk

Veronica Zora Kirin

Hi! I’m Veronica.