About Ash

The official version, for journalists, podcast hosts, and anyone introducing her on a stage:

Ash Ambirge is an author, essayist, and one of the internet's original voices on working from anywhere — a thing she started doing in 2009, back when "digital nomad" wasn't a LinkedIn hashtag but a decision that made your relatives worry about you at Thanksgiving. She has spent the seventeen years since living and working across South and Central America and Europe, building online businesses from Chilean apartments, Costa Rican beach towns, and at least one questionable Airbnb in Buenos Aires — and writing about all of it with the kind of candor that made her blog, The Middle Finger Project, one of the most defiantly loved sites on the early creator internet.

Her debut book, The Middle Finger Project (Penguin Random House, 2020), traces her path from a trailer park in rural Pennsylvania — where she was raised by a single, disabled mother — to a Kmart parking lot with $26 to her name, to a self-made career built entirely on her writing. It has been published internationally in multiple foreign editions, and her work has been featured by The New York Times, The New Yorker, BBC Radio, CBS, Entrepreneur Magazine, CNN Money, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.

Her subject, before it was fashionable, was professional independence: how ordinary people can use their words, their taste, and the internet to earn a living that doesn't require anyone's permission. It has never been more fashionable than now. In an era when AI can produce infinite competent-sounding sameness, Ambirge teaches the one thing it can't: sounding unmistakably like yourself — and getting paid for it. Her classes on writing, voice, and one-person business are taken by thousands of writers, founders, and corporate escapees, and her weekly essays reach readers in every time zone she's ever written from.

After twenty years abroad, she is currently writing from an 1872 farmhouse in the mountains of Pennsylvania, which she is renovating — a plot twist she is documenting with the enthusiasm of a war correspondent and the plumbing knowledge of a poet. She remains suspicious of fish.

The short version

Ash Ambirge is the author of The Middle Finger Project (Penguin Random House) and has written online about work, money, and living anywhere since 2009. Featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, BBC Radio, CBS, Entrepreneur, CNN Money, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Currently: an 1872 farmhouse, a body of 1,200+ essays, and a mission to keep human voices weirder than the machines.

Contact

General: ash@ashambirge.com
Literary agent: Lisa DiMona, Writers House — ldimona@writershouse.com