Michelle Zaffino

Michelle Zaffino is a digital librarian and information architect in San Francisco, with over 10 years of content experience, including magazine and online publishing, writing, UX, content strategy and management, copywriting and editing. She worked in New York for several Hearst publications, and while managing the research department at Marie Claire, she wrote Does Your Man Need A Makeover?, which inspired tv’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

She’s been published in Marie Claire, Redbook, Sports Afield, SEEN, Double Negative, Sportswear International, IndiePlanet, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, The Bold Italic, Her Fab Life, the Sephora blog, Eco Fashion World, Eco to the People and In the Stacks video book review. She recently completed her first teen novel, How Good It Can Be, a sequel, The Love Quad, Allegra, a historical novel for teens, and is currently working on a series for young adults, Skylar Saffron, Librarian Detective (available at LibrarianDetective.com) and a memoir.

In 2012 Michelle graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences with a MLIS (3.825 final gpa) and is founder of the digital library/publishing startup In the Stacks.tv, creators of the Librarian Brain.

Through the experience of writing 3 novels and earning her graduate degree, Michelle realized that whether your book is indie or traditionally published, book discovery is broken, so she learned to code, in order to build products to fix it. In the Stacks is her way of sharing good books with the readers who love them. As video continues to expand, so will the In the Stacks digital library, and the Librarian Brain was born out of our love for metadata.

Michelle has appeared in segments for the Meera Kaul Foundation, Bare Escentuals Multi-Wrinkle Repair, Code: Debugging the Gender Gap (non-speaking role), local SF indie radio Mutiny Radio, and a plethora of BRoll and modeling on a Lifetime daytime talk show, NBC morning talk show, CNN Outdoor, WB11 morning news (from when she was a magazine editor in New York), and a MTV live broadcast talent search. She's also appeared in various videotaped author reading appearances and conference panel discussions and recently auditioned for Shark Tank. She's also recorded and starred in almost 200 video book review videos.

Sub-specialties: Literacy, Learning to Code, Publishing, Digital Storytelling, Metadata.