Melanie Pappadis Faranello

Writer Bio

Melanie Faranello is an award-winning writer living in CT. Her writing has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and shortlisted for Sarabande Books’ Mary McCarthy Prize in Fiction; The Dana Awards for the Novel; William Faulkner's Wisdom Competition in the Novel;  Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Contest; The Petrochino Reprint Award; as well as winner of  the Marianne Russo Award for novel-in-progress from Key West Literary Seminars and winner of The New School Chapbook Competition in Fiction . Her writing has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Blackbird, Huffington Post Personal, Vestal Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal , StorySouth, Connotation Press, Requited, Literary Mama, among others. The recipient of a CT Individual Artist Fellowship Award in Fiction, she received her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. 

She's the founder of  Poetry on the Streets, LLC, which was featured on NPR, and has received multiple grants to support this project for community engagement and social impact. She's a Creative Community Fellow with National Arts Strategies; a teaching artist certified Kingian Nonviolence; a global-cohort member of The Pollination Project's Greenhouse- a worldwide project for artist change-makers.

Originally from Chicago, Melanie has lived and worked as a teaching artist in New York City, Chicago, Boulder, Hartford, and Cuenca, Ecuador. She studied in Nepal, where her field research was recording Limbu oral folklore from the Northeast Himalayas. She currently lives with her family in West Hartford, CT, teaches creative writing in the community, leads projects through Poetry on the Streets both locally and globally, and is at work on her writing. Her completed manuscripts include two novels (literary fiction), a collection of short stories, and a collection of creative non-fiction. 

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 fiction writer with her public art work in the community. 

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