Melissa is a writer and editor who listens deeply in order to suggest how to effectively braid the threads of your story together.
In her late teens, Melissa began publishing poetry under her maiden name, Melissa N. Warren (Southern Poetry Review, Number One, Cumberland Poetry Review) and winning writing awards (ARTS Award: National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts, National Scholastic Gold Writing Award, Presidential Scholar Finalist for Writing).
After completing her education at Skidmore College in 2002, she spent a few months working for Homeland Security before she began traveling the world. Melissa documented her experiences in a travel column (Views from A Broad, The Nashville Scene), helped organize monthly writing events in Amsterdam (wordsinhere), and also worked as a crime reporter (The Review Appeal). All of this enriched her world view and enhanced her writing style.
Since then, she facilitates workshops, provides marketing and editing services, and creates websites for other writers. She is currently at work on a chapbook, with most recent publishing credits found in Gordon Square Review and in NEORSD’s Odes to Infrastucture zine. (That was her favorite reading ever — deep in the sewers.)
She was awarded the Lit Cleveland Fellowship to the DISQUIET International Writing Festival for summer 2026, and is a Boost award grantee from Assembly for the Arts this year, as well. She will be featured as one of 30 Ohio poets in April 2026 for National Poetry Month with the Cuyahoga County Library, and will be featured as an Ekphrastic poet with Heights Arts that month, too.
Every service she offers is devoted to encouraging writers — whether she is facilitating a course about mother loss (Writing with Hope, a foundational writing class for NY Times best-selling author Hope Edelman) or sitting beside a middle school student to explore a prompt. When she works with clients, she is engaged and present — whether on a phone call with an octogenarian memoirist, on the Zoom screen with rising seniors editing their college essays, or in-person at retreats and writing circles.
In her non-working hours, Melissa enjoys sitting with toes in mud (or snow) near the Crooked River, growing children, playing piano, sitting on the porch with her partner, and petting dogs. She is intolerant of intolerance, leans towards hope, and is deeply connected to spirits here and beyond.