Melanie Pappadis Faranello a writer and teaching artist from Chicago. Winner of the 2025 Donald L Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, her debut story collection, Everybody Needs Something, will be published by CSU Press in March 2026. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Swamp Pink, StoryQuarterly, Electric Literature, Hippocampus, Vol 1. Brooklyn, Permafrost, HuffPost Personal, Blackbird, Literary Mama, Catamaran, Vestal Review, and elsewhere, and nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Her novel-in-progress won an Emerging Writer Award from Key West Literary Seminars, and her work has been shortlisted for Dana Awards for the Novel; William Faulkner's Wisdom Competition in the Novel.
She holds her MFA in Fiction from The New School and has attended Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers Conferences. A recipient of a CT Artist Fellowship Award in Fiction, she was awarded 2024 Writer-in-Residencies at Monson Arts and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center.
She is the founder of the community engagement project, Poetry on the Streets. A Creative Community Fellow with National Arts Strategies, a Teaching Artist certified in Kingian Nonviolence, and a global-cohort member of The Pollination Project's Greenhouse- a worldwide project for artist change-makers.
Melanie has taught in New York, Chicago, Hartford, and Ecuador, and studied abroad in Nepal, where her field research was recording Limbu Oral Folklore from the Northeast Himalayas. She lives with her family in West Hartford, CT and is at work on a novel.
Her belief in fiction as a vehicle for connection as well a way to explore the human condition is the thread that connects her work as a writer with her community engagement work.