Please join the Department of English Visiting Writers Series for a reading and Q&A with Melissa Faliveno.
Melissa Faliveno is the author of the debut essay collection, Tomboyland (Topple Books, 2020), named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, and Electric Literature and the 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, Literary Hub, Ms Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, and Prairie Schooner, among others, as well as 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.
Part personal narrative, part cultural reportage, Tomboyland navigates midwestern traditions, mythologies, landscapes, and lives to explore the intersections of identity and place. Faliveno traverses the liminal spaces of her childhood in working-class Wisconsin and the paths she's travelled since, compelled by questions of girlhood and womanhood, queerness and class, and how the lands of our upbringing both define and complicate us long after we've left.
This reading is free and open to the public. Q&A and book signing to follow. Books will be available for sale from Prologue Bookshop.
