Melanie Pierce is a writer and ex-Evangelical who grew up in the suburbs of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The recipient of residencies and fellowships from the Charlotte Street Foundation, BookEnds, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Pleiades, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from Stony Brook University, where she taught undergraduate creative writing and worked for The Southampton Review. Currently, she teaches writing and literature at the Kansas City Art Institute and serves as the reviews editor for The New Territory. She lives in Kansas City, Missouri, with her spouse and with a terrier named Grendel.