Melanie Bishop holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Arizona, and has published fiction and nonfiction in Glimmer Train, Georgetown Review, Greensboro Review, Florida Review, Valley Guide, Hospice Magazine, Puerto del Sol, The American, Potomac Review and Family Circle. She received a screenwriting fellowship from the Chesterfield Writers’ Film Project, co-sponsored by Universal Studios and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. The Makeover, a screenplay written during the fellowship year, later went on to place in America’s Best Screenplay Competition. For twenty-two years, she served on the creative writing faculty at Prescott College, where she was founding editor, fiction and nonfiction editor of Alligator Juniper, an award-winning, national literary magazine. Her short story cycle, Home for Wayward Girls, has been a finalist five times over the past four years: The Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, sponsored by Sarabande Books; the University of Iowa Press Short Fiction Awards; Doris Bakwin Award, sponsored by Carolina Wren Press; the Tartt Fiction Award sponsored by University of West Alabama’s Livingston Press; and the Eludia Award. Individual stories in the cycle have been finalists for both the A.E.Coppard Prize (May 2010) and Glimmer Train’s Family Matters Contest (June 2009). Other stories in the cycle earned Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open and Family Matters Contests. Bishop’s young adult novel, My So-Called Ruined Life (Book One of the Tate McCoy Series) was released in January by Torrey House Press. Her ongoing writing projects include marketing Home for Wayward Girls, revising Some Glad Morning, a memoir about loss and grief, and writing Book Two of the Tate McCoy Series. Melanie divides her time between Prescott, Arizona and Carmel, California. She has a freelance editing business, Lexi Services, teaches community classes in Carmel, and hosts writing retreats at Vagabond’s House Inn in Carmel, and Boulders in Santa Cruz.
