Mike Bernhardt is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in many print and online publications including DIVER Magazine, Journey Beyond Travel, GeoEx Travel, Hidden Compass, and others.
Traveling is so much more than ‘doing’ a destination when we take the time to talk to people, sit for a cup of coffee or tea, and try to look under the surface of a place to learn a bit about what’s hidden from the rush of sightseeing and selfies.
Mike has won many awards for his travel essays. “When I write,” he says, “I try to share my experience of being in a place rather than just what it looked like and what we did.”
He hopes that you feel like you’re there with him if you can’t go yourself, and that you come away with a better sense of what’s possible if you do go.
In the years that followed the death of his first wife in 1991, Mike remarried, raised a son, published the first and second editions of Voices of the Grieving Heart, retired from an IT career, and wrote numerous award-winning essays. Mike volunteers as a peer grief support volunteer and is a Certified Grief Educator. He has spoken to groups, on radio, and on podcasts to discuss this book, his experience of grief, and how poetry can help us to express the inexpressible.
Mike is also working on a book about his wife’s family, who lived through a wide range of little-known events and experiences during World War II. Read an excerpt from that project here.
Mike and his wife reside in the San Francisco Bay Area.
