Melanie Pierce is a writer, educator, and editor. An ex-Evangelical who grew up in Oklahoma, she writes literary fiction and essays about complicated ties to family and community, trauma and anxiety, and women and queer folks fighting for autonomy within—and beyond—patriarchal systems.
Her work has appeared in publications like Grist, CRAFT, Electric Literature, Pleiades, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in fiction from Stony Brook University, where she was supported by a graduate assistantship, taught undergraduate creative writing, curated a campus reading series, and served as an assistant editor for The Southampton Review. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Charlotte Street Foundation, BookEnds at SBU, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
Melanie lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she previously worked for independent bookstores, taught writing and literature at the Kansas City Art Institute, and taught fiction workshops at The Lawrence Arts Center. Currently, Melanie works for The Story Center, a mission-enhancement program at Mid-Continent Public Library, where she coordinates ~100 programs per year on writing, publishing, and oral and digital storytelling. She also serves as the reviews editor for The New Territory. She lives with her spouse, the writer John Elizabeth Stintzi, and with a terrier named Grendel.