Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press, 2010). The 2013 winner of the Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Prize and a 2013 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund artist grant, she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf Writers’ conference, and is assistant professor of creative nonfiction at Monmouth University, as well as MFA faculty in the low-residency program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She splits her time between Brooklyn, New York, and Mohave Valley, Arizona.
2024 Nonfiction Contest
Winter 2025
Introduction
The Kenyon Review’s annual nonfiction contest was judged by Melissa Febos, acclaimed author of four books, including the national bestselling essay collection Girlhood, which has been translated into eight languages. […]
Mar/Apr 2022
A Big Shitty Party: Six Parables of Writing about Other People
Dear Miss Bankhead: I thought I was a friend of yours. That’s why there’s nothing in my book that was unfriendly to you, unkind or libelous. Because I didn’t want […]
Nonfiction
Fall 2014
All of Me
The touch of strangers still startles me. Unknown fingertips brushing the soft inside of my bicep, grazing the back of my shoulder, closing firmly around my forearm. I flinch, gasp, […]