About the Author

Mitchell Near is an author, an urbanist and a life-long connoisseur of art, architecture, music and the hidden worlds of dreams. He views the city as a place to discover and create our human culture. His stories and essays examine and explore the many facets of urban life. His work has appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Idle Ink, Bewildering Stories, Fiction on the Web and Still Point Arts Quarterly.

After youthful sojourns in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego and Seattle, Mitchell  has made his home, for over 30 years, in San Francisco. He has walked the many neighborhoods of the city, wearing down the soles of many shoes, climbing to the tops of the myriad hills and gazing out at the views of the Pacific Ocean, the Marin Headlands and the waters of the San Francisco Bay. The city provides a setting, a backdrop, even a character, in many of his essays and stories.

Mitchell graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He also completed a Master’s Degree in Architecture at the San Francisco Institute of Architecture. After many years commuting on foot and by subway from his Sunset District home to a Financial District office, where he labored as a software developer, Mitchell now writes, walks, gardens, plays the ukulele and savors craft chocolate.

A view of San Francisco (photo by the author)