Kristi Coulter
“I wanted to write about ambition in women through myself. I’m very ambitious—I always have been. When we hear that women are ambitious, we have certain associations, so I thought, well, let’s look at that. Does it mean I was cutthroat? Probably sometimes. Is there something wrong with it? Maybe. Does it mean I put up with shit I wouldn’t have otherwise? Yeah! I wanted to write about ambition as a human emotion that women have, just like men.”
“Exit Interview is pure joy from beginning to end. Kristi Coulter’s voice is truly inimitable: vibrantly intelligent, tender, occasionally furious, and always funny. A brilliant and surprisingly moving tour of the outer reaches of corporate madness.”
“Kristi Coulter has given us the most vivid account yet of Amazon’s chaotic, mercurial, dignity-crushing office culture. Exit Interview is also a very funny and intensely personal depiction of what it’s like to be female in the oppressively male world of technology.”
“With wry humor, Coulter provides candid insights about life, love, and gender as well as surviving a toxic workplace.”
“Kristi Coulter charts the raw, unvarnished, and quietly riveting terrain of new sobriety with wit and warmth. Nothing Good Can Come from This is a book about generative discomfort, surprising sources of beauty, and the odd, often hilarious, business of being human.”
“Coulter’s essays are short, smart, and with the heart that the (mostly male) addiction stories seem to miss . . .The pieces in Nothing Good Can Come from This are pleasantly messy incantations on loss, and what happens in its wake. Coulter shows her stumbles. She interrogates her usefulness, her language usage, her privilege, her ragged happiness . . . Coulter proves that our stories can be as complicated and powerful as we are.”
Kristi Coulter is an acclaimed memoirist, essayist, and fiction writer. Her most recent book is Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career (MCD, 2023), her memoir about work, gender, and Coulter’s twelve-year stint as an executive at Amazon, which Claire Dederer praised as “pure joy from beginning to end.” Her 2018 debut memoir Nothing Good Can Come from This (MCD Books x FSG Originals) was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award.
Coulter’s essays and fiction have appeared in The Paris Review, New York Magazine, Elle, Glamour, The Mississippi Review, DAME, The Believer, Alaska Quarterly, Columbia Journal, The Awl, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, where she held the Stephen Farrar and Roy Cowden Fellowships and won the Hopwood Award; she is also the recipient of residencies at Ragdale Foundation and The Mineral School. Coulter has taught writing and literature at the University of Michigan and the University of Washington Continuum College, and currently teaches at Seattle’s Hugo House.
In an interview in Longreads, she was asked about the role of humor in her work: “In terms of humor, in personal nonfiction or literature in general, there’s nothing more exhilarating than realizing an author finds the same weird things funny that you do. It’s a tiny but deep bonding moment, like when I meet someone who agrees with me that celery tastes like metal crossed with evil. But that humor has to be organic. I don’t use humor in my writing because I think it should be funny; I use humor because it’s one of my natural ways of coping with my own core desperation and terror and whatnot, so that comes through in my voice.”
Coulter was raised in South Florida and graduated from New College of Florida. She is a former content director at the All Music Guide, and held leadership roles in Amazon’s retail, publishing, and grocery divisions. She now writes full time, and lives with her husband and their golden retriever in Seattle and Los Angeles.
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