Hello and welcome. My name is Anna Mitchael. I’m an author, freelance writer, and New York Times bestselling ghostwriter. Once a month I moonlight as an advice columnist named Boots.
You can find a selection of my published pieces here.
I spent my twenties writing for ad agencies in cities like Boston, New York, Seattle, and Denver. When I met my husband, who worked and lived on a ranch in rural Texas, I told him I would try the country life for two years. In the end, I loved it and we stayed for ten. When our kids got to be school age we moved to Waco, Texas, and I became deputy editor of Magnolia Journal. Today I freelance as a writer and story collaborator for magazines, ad agencies, and individuals who want their stories told.
Sometimes people ask which I like better—big cities, small towns, or the middle of nowhere. My favorite place is in the tension between all three, where we realize one place is never going to give us everything we need. That understanding led me to the question: What can give me everything I need? Which then took me to God, and some of the most spiritually rich years of my life. Now it’s where I want all my living and writing to be.
My most recent work is a book called They Will Tell You the World is Yours. The collection of eighty-five vignettes tracks a woman from childhood through a mid-life crisis that turns into her spiritual awakening. After years as an editor for a national publication, where my daily inbox was filled with readers asking where to turn for purpose and truth, this collection offers an answer.
They Will Tell You The World is Yours will be published by Convergent, an imprint of Penguin Random House in May 2025.
From January 2020-2023 I was deputy editor for Magnolia Journal, a quarterly publication with a circulation of 1 million. In that role I managed a national pool of writers, assigned stories and saw them through to completion, and managed day-to-day editorial operations for the magazine. Since leaving my full-time position, I have still worked closely with the team as a contributing writer.
Magnolia Journal
Copygirl
Kay is an ad copywriter trying to make it in the big leagues. Lucky for her, she knows everything I didn’t know when I was living her life. Publishers Weekly says Copygirl is “Wickedly funny and smartly sweet… a high octane and electric look at Madison Avenue.”
published by Penguin/Berkley in 2015
I work with well-known public figures as well as just-starting-out authors who want help putting their stories on the page. In some cases, I ghostwrite the manuscript from start to finish. Other times, I help with thought organization, outlines, and story structure. All my ghostwriting projects are represented by Whitney Gossett at Content Capital.
Story Collaboration
Texans of all stripes send questions to Boots and every month I answer them in an advice column published in Wacoan, the city magazine of Waco, Texas. While it might seem Boots is talking about whether beans have a rightful place in chili and what makes a true Texan, underneath all that jaw she’s really addressing the bigger topics that affect every one of us: love, forgiveness, family matters, and—of course—if cowboy boots really do “go” with dresses. If you aren’t in the Waco area, you can read some recent Dear Boots columns here.
Dear Boots
Just Don’t Call Me Ma’am
My first book Just Don’t Call Me Ma’am was a memoir about taking the long way home. It was featured in the books section of the May, 2010 issue of Texas Monthly.
published by Seal Press in 2010
For the first seventeen years of my career I worked as a copywriter, and then a creative director, for some of the most well-known brands in the world, including Starbucks, Coca-Cola, The Wall Street Journal, VISA, and Procter & Gamble. Today I continue that work with a select group of clients. My advertising portfolio is available on request.
Copywriting
My new book They Will Tell You the World is Yours is the style of writing that was my first love: short vignettes that are part fiction, part poetry, and all about the emotional experience. I walked away from that writing style because in 2005 I took a writing workshop led by a very successful author who told me vignettes would never sell. It took years and years for me to return to them, and only after I realized the joy and freedom of writing had slowly trickled away and maybe—just maybe—I didn’t have to let other people tell me how or what to write. (Thank you, middle age.)
Now that I’ve returned to these miniature stories, I’m also experimenting with other shorter formats. At the end of last year, I was a guest poet for Tupelo Press’ 30/30 challenge, and I’ve even been conquering my massive fear of social media to post some fun-loving, paragraph-long pieces.
Whenever I do something new in writing it always makes me feel like I’m too far past the shallows and am in need of immediate return to some good ol’ fashioned advertising taglines I know, without a doubt, I can crank out before day’s end. But it’s the darnedest thing, when I’m out there too deep, arms flailing, heart racing, I sure do know I’m alive. Which I think has a little something to do with the aforementioned joy and freedom. So I keep at it. One reach after another for ways to express simple yet mighty, difficult but funny, heartbreaking and mending truths.
