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Melanie Jennings is a MacDowell fellow whose short stories, essays, and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fiction Southeast, Hotel Amerika, Clackamas Literary Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. Her story, “The Pool at Chualteca,” earned a recommended reading citation for best of the literary web from Dark Sky Magazine. 

Melanie is a former restaurant critic for Willamette Week and San Diego Fahrenheit, and columnist for Writers Monthly. She has written about food, music, theatre, and books for Portland Food and Drink, San Diego Restaurants, Dagger, and ChickLit, among other publications.

She has been awarded fiction residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (with Chris Abani), Tyrone Guthrie Centre Ireland, Jentel, Banff, and MacDowell. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Mills College and a doctorate in American Literature from UC San Diego, where she wrote a dissertation about her Dust Bowl Okie heritage and The Grapes of Wrath.

Melanie lives in Oregon, where she is working on a novel.