Melissa Pritchard was born in San Mateo, California. She has published twelve award-winning books of fiction, a biography, and a collection of essays. Among other prizes, she has received the University of Georgia’s Flannery O’Connor Award, the University of Rochester’s Janet Heidinger Kafka Award, Chicago’s Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers Prize. A five-time winner of Pushcart and O. Henry Prizes and frequently shortlisted in Best American Short Stories, her fiction and essays appear in The Paris Review, Agni, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, Ecotone, LitMag, A Public Space, O, The Oprah Magazine, the Wilson Quarterly and other venues. WordTheatre has performed her short stories in New York and Los Angeles; two of her books were named New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” and “Notable Books of the Year.” Others, receiving starred reviews from Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly, have been named as O, The Oprah Magazine “Top Titles” and “Book of the Week,” and as “Best Book of the Year” by The San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. Her essay collection, given a starred review by Library Journal, was included in Publishers Weekly “Top Ten in Essays, Literary Biography and Criticism,” and praised by Lit Hub as a “Best Book about Books,” and by Poets and Writers as a “Best Book for Writers.”
Pritchard’s writing has been anthologized in Mothers: Stories of Contemporary Motherhood, The Literary Ghost: Great Contemporary Ghost Stories, American Gothic Tales, The New Mortality: Thirty Writers Confront the Inevitable, Best of the West, Hingston and Olsen’s Short Story Advent Calendar, among other anthologies and textbooks.
Awarded fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, the Howard Foundation at Brown University, the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation in Switzerland, the Hawthornden Foundation in Scotland and the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, Melissa currently lives in Columbus, Georgia. Flight of the Wild Swan, her fifth novel, was published in March 2024 by Bellevue Literary Press. The Carnation Milk Palace, her fifth short story collection, will be published by Bellevue Literary Press in January 2027.
Photo Credit: Morgan Duke
Select Praise for Melissa Pritchard
“Pritchard is one of our finest writers.” —Annie Dillard
“[Pritchard has an] exquisite ear for tone and detail in story, [the] gift of mystic perception, and [a] sense of the historic layering of human lives and the events that make our lives absolutely distinct.” —Joy Harjo
“Pritchard polishes the strange and makes it shine.” —Leslie Jamison, San Francisco Chronicle
“Pritchard’s voice is completely her own and her characters are as unique, wild and magical as she is.” —Tayari Jones
“A writer at the height of her powers.” —Oprah.com
“Emotionally rich.” —New York Times
“The singularity of [Pritchard’s] narrators remains indelible.” —Washington Post
“[Pritchard] takes risks . . . Can she do it all with poetic, vivid prose? With one hand tied behind her back.” —Los Angeles Times