A hearty howdy and welcome to my website. Here you’ll find some boring-ass “I’m a writer” biographical info (below), as well as links to my death-defying, thrilling, escapist short stories, poems, and nonfiction. May you enjoy the storytelling you encounter herein. Grab a cold beer. You might need it.
To keep up with my whereabouts and exploits, saddle up to my newsletter here. I write at least once a month about my literary life and my friendship with Elizabeth Kaye Cook, as well as Stephen King, Jane Austen, Terry Pratchett, and my dog.
Traditional and traditionally boring writer bio:
Melanie Jennings is a MacDowell fellow whose short stories, essays, and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Fiction Southeast, Hotel Amerika, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. Her story, “The Pool at Chualteca,” earned a recommended reading citation for best of the literary web from Dark Sky Magazine.
A former restaurant critic for Willamette Week and San Diego Fahrenheit, and columnist for Writers Monthly, Melanie has written about food, music, theatre, and books for a variety of outlets. “Scenes From The Literary Blacklist,” and “The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction,” both co-written with Elizabeth Kaye Cook, appeared recently in Persuasion.
Melanie 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 and is working on a novel.
Melanie Jennings, writer 