Melissa Faliveno is the author of the debut essay collection TOMBOYLAND, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, and Debutiful, and recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Bitch, Brevity, Literary Hub, Ms Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, Autostraddle, No Tokens, the Millions, and Prairie Schooner, among others, and in the anthology SEX AND THE SINGLE WOMAN: 24 WRITERS REIMAGINE HELEN GURLEY BROWN’S CULT CLASSIC (Harper Perennial, 2022). A first-generation college graduate, Melissa holds a BA in English and creative writing from the University of Wisconsin and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She was the Fall 2022 Distinguished Visiting Writer in the MFA program at UNC–Wilmington, the 2020-21 Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC–Chapel Hill, and has taught creative writing at Kenyon College, Denison University, Sarah Lawrence College, Catapult, and to incarcerated men, high school students, and adults in and around New York City. She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at UNC-Chapel Hill, and on the MFA faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts. The former senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, she was previously an editor at Trails Books, an independent nonfiction press; and a freelance features writer and columnist for Isthmus, Madison, Wisconsin’s alternative weekly. She is the cofounding nonfiction editor of the Black Rabbit Review, a zine of art and literature based out of the Black Rabbit bar in her longtime neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn; and is a singer and guitarist in the band Self Help.