Melanie Faranello is the winner of the 2022 Marianne Russo Award for Novel-in-progress from Key West Literary Seminar's Emerging Writer Award and a 2018 grant recipient of an Artist Fellowship Award in fiction writing from the Connecticut Office of the Arts. She received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The New School, and her B.A. in English and Creative Writing from University of Colorado. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize as well as received a variety of mentions including winner of The New School’s Chapbook Award Series in Fiction, and a top twenty-five winner in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Contest. Her novel manuscript was a finalist in Sarabande Books’ Mary McCarthy Prize in Fiction, and a semi-finalist in The Dana Awards for The Novel and the Whidbey Writers Novel Contest. She has attended Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and Sewanee Writers' Conference, and was awarded a residency from The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and a full scholarship to Wesleyan Writers Conference. Her work has appeared in many literary magazines and journals. Her extensive teaching experience includes working as a teaching artist bringing creative writing workshops to at-risk youth, teens, and seniors in the community, after school programs, and classrooms, as well as an adjunct professor teaching English, Creative Writing, and ESL at a variety of universities in New York City and Chicago including University of Chicago, Roosevelt University, American Academy of the Arts, Parsons School of Design. She studied in Nepal and her completed field research project, collecting and translating oral folklore of the Limbu people of Northeast Nepal, was published by Pilgrims Publishing: Limbu Folklore: a collection of oral folklore and photographs. She also spent a year teaching English Language and Literature in Cuenca, Ecuador. A Chicago native, (she created the Chicago branch of NYC's Sunday Salon--"Sunday Salon Chicago"), and she currently lives in Connecticut where she teaches creative writing to youth and teens in Hartford and is the founder/creator of Poetry on the Streets, LLC (www.poetryonthestreets.com [2]). She is a 2019 Creative Community Fellow with National Arts Strategies.