Halsted M. Bernard

Hal­sted M. Bernard wrote her first story when she was three years old about an over­sized rab­bit that haunted her dreams.

The rab­bit went away, but she kept writing.

Hal­sted has kept a diary since 1980. In 1998, she started to keep one online, back when blogs were known as “online jour­nals”. The cur­rent iter­a­tion of her jour­nal is cygnoir.net, named after the black swan.

At the Uni­ver­sity of Alabama at Birm­ing­ham, Hal­sted fused her three main inter­ests — cre­ative writ­ing, Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture, and lin­guis­tics — into a Bach­e­lor of Arts degree in the struc­ture and cul­ture of the Eng­lish language.

Also dur­ing her tenure at UAB, Hal­sted accepted a work-study posi­tion at one of the libraries on cam­pus. What was orig­i­nally a prefer­able alter­na­tive to work­ing in the gym­na­sium resulted in a career in library sci­ence. Her cur­rent posi­tion is an invig­o­rat­ing blend of ref­er­ence work, project man­age­ment, and supervision.

Hal­sted lives in San Fran­cisco near the ocean with her part­ner, two cats, sev­eral foun­tain pens, and hun­dreds of books.