Nikki Hardin

Last seen: 08/28/2008

~nikki

Check out my blog!

Biography

Founder and Publisher of Skirt!. A native of Kentucky, I left home at 17 to elope with my high-school boyfriend. Twelve years later, divorced with three children and unskilled at almost everything, I started college at the age of 29. Earned a B.A. in literature from American University in 1976 and attended graduate school at the University of Virginia on a Governor’s Fellowship. I never completed my master’s degree, however, because I spent most of the year crying and watching Kojak reruns. Started my first real full-time job a year later when I was hired as a secretary for a book publishing company in northern Virginia. In 1985, I moved to Charleston, SC, which I had never visited and barely heard of before. I spent the next several years nursing a midlife crisis while I eked out a living by cleaning houses, working in a bed and breakfast, clerking in a liquor store that had a psychotic parrot and no heat or air conditioning, and writing descriptions of mythical Irish pubs and taverns for a local mail-order company. I started Skirt! in 1994 with not much more than $400 and the desire to have something interesting to read. What a long strange trip it's been.