Melissa Grunow is the author of I Don't Belong Here: Essays (New Meridian Arts Press, 2018), finalist in the 2019 Independent Author Network Book of the Year Awards and finalist in the 2019 Best Indie Book Awards from Shelf Unbound, and Realizing River City: A Memoir (Tumbleweed Books, 2016), which won the 2018 Book Excellence Award in Memoir, the 2017 Silver Medal in Nonfiction-Memoir from Readers' Favorite International Book Contest, and Second Place-Nonfiction in the 2016 Independent Author Network Book of the Year Awards. 
 

Melissa's essays have been nominated by literary journal editors for the 2021 and 2017 Best of the Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize in 2022. Her work has been listed as a notable essay in The Best American Essays in 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2021. She is a four-time recipient of the Detroit Working Writers creative nonfiction prize, first place winner of the Rochester Writers' 2016 Summer Award in the Michigan Memoir category, and a semi-finalist for the DISQUIET International Literary Lisbon Writing Program award in 2015 and 2016. 

Her work has also appeared in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, The Nervous Breakdown, New Plains Review, and Blue Lyra Review, among many others.

Melissa holds a Bachelor of Science in English-creative writing and journalism from Central Michigan University, a Master of Arts in English from New Mexico State University, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing with distinction from National University.

She is an associate professor of English at Illinois Central College and founding editor of the campus literary magazine, Illinois Central Review.

 

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