Melanie Pappadis Faranello

Melanie Pappadis Faranello is an award-winning writer from Chicago. 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. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her novel-in-progress won an Emerging Writer Award from Key West Literary Seminars. Her work has been 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 holds her MFA in Fiction from The New School. A recipient of a CT Artist Fellowship Award in Fiction, she has attended Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers Conferences and was awarded 2024 Writer-in-Residencies at Monson Arts and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center.  

She is also 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 for over twenty-five years in New York City, Chicago, Hartford, Colorado, and Cuenca, Ecuador. She studied abroad in Nepal, where her field research was recording Limbu Oral Folklore from the Northeast Himalayas. Currently, she lives with her family in West Hartford, CT,  where she continues to write , teach, and lead 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, and she is at work on her third 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. 

To read some of her work click: PUBLICATIONS AND AWARDS

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