Melanie Pappadis Faranello

Melanie Pappadis Faranello is an award-winning writer and teaching artist born in Chicago. 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 Short Fiction Contest; The Petrochino Reprint Award. She won the  Marianne Russo Award for novel-in-progress from Key West Literary Seminars and The New School Chapbook Competition in Fiction . Her work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Hippocampus, Blackbird, Pedestal, Huffington Post Personal, Vestal Review, Catamaran, StorySouth, Mom Egg Review, Adelaide, Connotation Press, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. A recipient a CT Artist Fellowship Award in Fiction, she received her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. She has attended Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. She was awarded 2024 Writer-in-Residencies at Monson Arts and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center.  

She is also the founder of Poetry on the Streets, LLC.  She was chosen as 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 for over twenty-five years, both as an adjunct professor and a teaching artist in New York City, Chicago, Hartford, Colorado, and Cuenca, Ecuador. She studied abroad in Nepal, where her field research was Limbu Oral Folklore from the Northeast Himalayas. Currently, she lives with her family in West Hartford, CT,  where she writes, teaches, and leads community projects through Poetry on the Streets. 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. 

To read some of her work click: PUBLICATIONS AND AWARDS

To say hi or inquire about workshops: Contact