Melissa R. Sipin is a writer from Carson, CA. She won Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open and the Washington Square Review’s Flash Fiction Prize. She co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things, an anthology on Philippine myths (Carayan Press 2014), and her work is in Black Warrior Review, Guernica Magazine, PEN/Guernica Flash Series, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, Eleven Eleven Magazine, and Amazon’s literary journal Day One, among others. Cofounder of TAYO Literary Magazine, her fiction has won scholarships and fellowships from MacDowell, Poets & Writers Inc., Kundiman, VONA/Voices Conference, Squaw Valley’s Community of Writers, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and was shortlisted for the David Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. She is represented by Sarah Levitt at Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency in New York. At MacDowell, she completed the first draft of a manuscript for her in-progress novel, Scorched-Earth, which is based loosely on her family’s history and accounts of her grandmother's imprisonment in a Japanese Imperial Army garrison where she gave birth to her first daughter, and her grandfather’s unrecognized service while fighting alongside the U.S. military in WWII. More information can be found at her website.
Lis Sipin
Studios
Veltin
Lis Sipin worked in the Veltin studio.
Veltin Studio was donated by alumni of the Veltin School, a school for girls in New York with a highly respected visual arts department. As the plaque just outside the entrance attests, this studio was used by poet Edwin Arlington Robinson during most of the 24 summers he spent at MacDowell. Perhaps most famously, Thornton Wilder put the finishing…