Photo of author Miranda Schmidt beneath a sequoia tree by water

Miranda Schmidt

Miranda Schmidt is a writer living in Portland, Oregon whose work circles the folkloric, the familial, queer magic, and the more-than-human world. Leafskin (Stillhouse Press 2025) is their debut novel and The Cemetery Cure (dancing girl press 2026) is their new poetry chapbook.

A poet and her husband have been trying to make a baby. But while undergoing fertility treatments in the midst of a harrowing wildfire season, Jo reconsiders raising a child in a time of climate crisis. When her artist ex-girlfriend, who has always had an uncanny connection to nature, re-enters her life, Jo struggles to navigate the transformations in her relationships and realities. 

Miranda Schmidt's lyrical debut novel blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose, human and nonhuman, reality and magic. A tale of queer love, new motherhood, and ecological interconnectedness, Leafskin interrogates how we create, and what we become, in a time of environmental devastation. 

line image that looks like an eye and a tree in blue and green colors
cover of The Cemetery Cure by Miranda Schmidt with art by Verena Raban

The Cemetery Cure is a small book of spells, an underworld journey of the body brushing up against the life/death veil and finding new form there.

Upcoming Courses & Summer Writing Workshops

Writing with Plants, Animals, and Ecosystems

In this generative online writing class, we'll embrace the ways that plants, animals, and ecosystems influence our writing practices — considering how our work shifts and grows around these influences.

The First 10 Pages: A Revision Workshop

The first pages of a book create the entryway into the story. In this workshop, participants will focus on revising the first 10 pages of a book-length manuscript of fiction or creative nonfiction/memoir.

Novel Support: Weekly Check-In

Are you writing a novel? Do you want company? This course brings novel writers at all stages of the process together to support each other for 8 weeks.