Melissa Pritchard
Melissa Pritchard is the author of twelve books, including a biography and collection of essays. Consistently cited or reprinted in The Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories and O.Henry Prize Stories, her work appears in anthologies, textbooks and online sites like Byliner, Longform and Longreads. She is the recipient of the Flannery O’Connor, Carl Sandburg and Janet H. Kafka Awards. Her stories have been performed by WordTheatre actors in New York City and Los Angeles. She has been published in over seventy journals, including The Paris Review, O, the Oprah Magazine and the New York Times.
Melissa's 2015 essay collection A Solemn Pleasure was named a “Best Books for Writers” by Poets and Writers, and a Publishers Weekly “Top Ten in Essays, Literary Biography and Criticism.” In an essay entitled “Spirit and Vision” Melissa poses the question: “Why write?” Her answer reverberates throughout A Solemn Pleasure, presenting an undeniable case for both the power of language and the nurturing constancy of the writing life. Bret Anthony Johnston, director of Creative Writing at Harvard University says A Solemn Pleasure is “Gorgeous and moving... Each of these essays confirms that to write is to think and feel, to take part in the profound and sacred act of witness.”
Melissa is an Emeritus Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Arizona State University (1992-2016), where she received awards for her teaching and service. In 2009, she established the Ashton Goodman Fund, working with the Afghan Women’s Writing Project to provide funding for the literacy and education of Afghan women and girls. Melissa was the 2016 Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellow at the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians in Columbus, Georgia, where she now lives and writes.
"No one is quite so brilliant at voicing the all-but-impossible-to-track interior lives of the most complex human beings as is Melissa Pritchard…there is so much energy and inventiveness! Her linguistic flexibility is stunning, comic and gravely substantial.”
— Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives and The Heaven of Mercury
"Pritchard is a writer of sensibility. Her unique gift is the ability to interweave the resonances of consciousness—memory, intelligence, emotion—with those of a historical time and a powerful sense of place, so that character emerges as a coherent, credible, internal voice uttering a sensual flow of language, both lush and precise.”
—Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago