Melissa Scholes Young’s work has appeared in Narrative, Ploughshares, the Huffington Post, Poets & Writers Magazine, Poet Lore, Brain, Child, Literary Mama, New Madrid, the Yalobusha Review, and other literary journals. She earned her MFA at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where she was an assistant editor of the Crab Orchard Review. Her short stories have been nominated several times for Pushcart Prizes.
 
She’s currently a contributing editor for Fiction Writers Review where she enjoys interviewing authors whose work she admires.
 
Melissa teaches college writing and creative writing at American University in Washington, D.C. She spent ten years teaching high school English and a few more teaching middle school at the American School in Brasilia, Brazil.
 
She attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2014 and was awarded a Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellowship in 2015. The fellowship included a month-long residency in Cassis, France.
 
Her novel-in-progress was a semifinalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. She has work forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, American Fiction from New Rivers Press, Gravity and Grace from Paycock Press, and Literary Mama.
 
Melissa was born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, and she still proudly claims it her hometown. She goes fishing as much as she can with her dad on the St. John’s River. She lives in Maryland with her family and beloved mutt, Huckleberry Finn.
 
Her website is melissascholesyoung.com. You can follow her on Twitter, @mscholesyoung.