Her debut novel, The Golden State, was published in September 2018 by MCD Books, a division of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
[2] The Golden State follows a new mother, Daphne, whose Turkish husband, ensnarled in visa complications, is unable to return to the US; overwhelmed by the demands of parenthood, Daphne takes leave from a bureaucratic office job at a large university to go on a road trip to rural Northern California with her daughter.
[7][8] Mobility follows Elizabeth "Bunny" Glenn from her time as an American teenager living in Azerbaijan with her foreign service family during the collapse of the Soviet Union into the new millennium as she comes of age and develops a career in the oil industry in Texas.
[9] Kiesling received an undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.
[12] Prior to writing The Golden State, Kiesling directed outreach at UC Berkeley's Center for Middle Eastern Studies for 3 years, leaving in May 2016.