Ana McCracken comes to the creative writing and environment program as a non-fiction candidate far removed from her undergraduate years. Since graduating from Iowa State with a B.S. in Fashion Merchandising, McCracken has held careers as a retail buyer, director of executive education programs, and a hospice marketing director. All positions required writing, and an inciting incident caused McCracken to realize her calling was that of a writer.
McCracken’s personal essays are published in The California Writers Club Literary Review, and the anthologies Nothing But The Truth So Help Me God, The Joy of Adoption, and Chicken Soup for the Adopted Soul. She is a former columnist and editor for Maui Vision Magazine. Her writing has appeared in publications around the San Francisco Bay Area.
During her tenure at Iowa State, McCracken plans to pen poems, essays, and a memoir, all of which will touch upon the entanglement of relationships as environment and place as environment. McCracken yearns to discover why certain places resonate with one person but not another? She has also become fascinated by the Welsh word, hiraeth, “a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was.”