Melanie Jennings is a MacDowell fellow whose creative work has appeared in Ploughshares, Hotel Amerika, Fiction Southeast, and many other literary magazines. She is the former fiction co-editor of Crab Creek Review.

As a journalist, Melanie’s work has been featured in Lit Hub, Publishers Weekly, Persuasion, Willamette Week, and other outlets. “Scenes from the Literary Blacklist” was shared over 1M times. She writes a newsletter here.

Melanie earned an MFA from Mills College and a doctorate in American Literature from UC San Diego where she wrote a dissertation about her Dust Bowl Okie heritage, The Grapes of Wrath, and 19th-century women’s literature of the U.S. She has been awarded residencies from Banff, MacDowell, VCCA, Jentel, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre of Ireland.

Originally from California, Melanie lives in Oregon, where she is always working on a novel.