Melissa Range is the author of Scriptorium, a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series (Beacon Press, 2016), and Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press, 2010). Originally from East Tennessee, she teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
She has recently completed a third collection about the abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century U.S. Recent poems have appeared in Ecotone, The Hopkins Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Nation, and Ploughshares. Range is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
At MacDowell, Range completed a first draft of her fourth poetry collection, Like the Wren, a manuscript that investigates themes of visibility, invisibility, display, privacy, knowledge, and gender through poems that pay close attention to individual bird species. The manuscript also interrogates both human interactions with birds and the human desire to make metaphors for human experience from birds' own experience. Work on this manuscript has also been supported by residencies at Sundress Academy for the Arts and the Everwood Artist Retreat.
Portrait by Justus Poehls
