Tristine Rainer

Tristine Rainer is a pioneer and expert in the fields of contemporary diary and memoir writing.

As a grad student at UCLA in 1972, she co-founded the university’s Women’s Studies program and taught the first course offered on women writers, funded by Curriculum and Educational Development. Her path in high education continued through the 1970s as she taught as a Lecturer at Indiana University in Bloomington in 1974, and in 1975 she joined the faculty of International College in Los Angeles, where she co-taught a writing class with her mentor Anaïs Nin.

In 1978 Tristine Rainer’s book The New Diary: How to Use a Journal for Self-guidance and Expanded Creativity (Tarcher/Penguin-Random, 1978, updated 2004) was published with a preface by Anaïs Nin. It popularized contemporary journal writing and created its lexicon. Never out of print in the States, The New Diary has been translated into many European languages, and published in Korea (2011) and China (2012).

Having gained experiential knowledge in shaping true-life stories for a wide audience, Rainer wrote Your Life as Story: Discovering the New Autobiography and Writing Memoir as Literature (1997, Tarcher/ Penguin-Random, 1997) to teach others how to see and share the universals of story structure within their unique life events. She returned to teaching and lecturing, creating the first autobiographic writing course for UCLA Extension (1996), the first autobiographic film course for University of Hawaii (2003), and the first memoir class in the USC Masters of Professional Writing Program, where she served as a faculty member for 11 years until 2010. Rainer has coached many authors to publication, including New York Times bestseller and MacArthur genius award winner Elyn Saks, The Center Cannot Hold (Hyperion, 2007).

As founder and Director of the Center for Autobiographic Studies, a 501c3 since 1997, Rainer promotes the creation and preservation of autobiographic works, teaches, lectures and consults. Her own memoir about her relationship with her mentor Anaïs Nin, Apprenticed to Venus, will be published July, 2017 by Arcade Books.