Novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist, Melissa Pritchard is the author of three short story collections: Spirit Seizures, The Instinct for Bliss, and Disappearing Ingenue; three novels: Phoenix, Selene of the Spirits, and Late Bloomer; and Devotedly, Virginia, a biography of Arizona philanthropist Virginia Galvin Piper.

Her first collection, Spirit Seizures, a New York Times Notable Book, received both the Flannery O’Connor and Carl Sandburg awards. The Instinct for Bliss, a New York Times Editor's Choice book, received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and Disappearing Ingenue, a Doubleday "Fiction for the Rest of Us" selection, was chosen to appear on National Public Radio's 2002 Summer Reading List. Stories from all three collections have been included and cited in The O'Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories and numerous other anthologies. Her work has been translated into Italian and Spanish.

Selene of the Spirits was a Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection, and Late Bloomer, one of the Chicago Tribune’s Best Books of 2004, was described as “ravishing” by Vanity Fair magazine and received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly.

A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Howard Foundation at Brown University, the Illinois Arts Council, Writer’s Voice YMCA, and Scotland's Hawthornden International Fellowship, Melissa Pritchard currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University. She recently completed her fourth story collection, The Odditorium.