Toni Mirosevich grew up in Everett, Washington, in a Croatian-American fishing family, which was part of an extensive immigrant Slav community. Her first adult jobs were in nontraditional work fields for women--as a truckdriver, attic insulator and weatherizer, swimming pool operator, blood bank mobile unit driver, janitor, laborer, and handyperson.

<> In her early thirties she returned to school and received her MA and MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, where she began teaching as a lecturer in creative writing in 1991. Firebrand Books published her first book of poetry and prose, The Rooms We Make Our Own, in 1996. That same year, Mirosevich became Associate Director of the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives.

<> In 2005, her collection of poems, Queer Street, was published by Custom Words. Also in 2005, another poetry collection, My Oblique Strategies, won the Frank O'Hara Chapbook Award and was published by Thorngate Road Press. Literary awards include the Astraea Foundation Emerging Lesbian Writer in Fiction Award, Pushcart Prize and Lambda Literary Award nominations, and fellowships with the MacDowell Colony, the Espy Foundation and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program.

<> Mirosevich has recently focused her attention on writing and teaching in multiple genres. Her work has appeared in UTNE, Kenyon Review, The Progressive, Gastronomica, Five Fingers Review, The Bark and elsewhere. Poems and stories have been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing, The Impossible Will Take A Little While, The Discovery of Poetry, AutoBioDiversity and elsewhere.