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John Beckett
Biography
Melissa Pritchard
Professor of English and Women's Studies at Arizona State University, Melissa Pritchard is the nationally acclaimed 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 a biography: Devotedly, Virginia: The Life of Virginia Galvin Piper. A recipient of numerous prestigious literary awards, including the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Carl Sandburg Award, the James Phelan Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best fiction by an American woman and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Writers Voice YMCA, and Brown University's Howard Foundation, Pritchard's fiction has appeared widely in such literary journals as: The Southern Review, Boulevard, Open City, The Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions, Image, and The Paris Review. Her stories are frequently cited and reprinted in anthologies such as: Desire: Women Write About Wanting; Pushcart Prize XX and XXVI; Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards; Best American Short Stories; The Prentice Hall Anthology of Women's Literature; Best of the West; Great Contemporary Ghost Stories; Mothers: Twenty Stories of Contemporary Motherhood; and American Gothic Tales, as well as college textbooks such as: Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer; Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers; Behind the Short Story: From First to Final Draft; and A Garden of Forking Paths: An Anthology for Creative Writers.
Elected a Fellow at Scotland’s Hawthornden Castle in 2008, Pritchard has also received the Claudia Ortese Memorial Lecture Prize in North American Literature from the University of Florence and her fiction has been translated into Spanish and Italian. Her novel Selene of the Spirits was selected for the Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” series and her short story collection, Disappearing Ingenue, featured in Doubleday's “Fiction for the Rest of Us” series, was chosen by Alan Cheuse for National Public Radio's 2002 Annual Summer Reading List. Her latest novel Late Bloomer, published by Doubleday in 2004, has been called “brilliant” by Publishers Weekly in a starred review, “ravishing” by Vanity Fair magazine, and was named a 2004 Best Book of the Year by the Chicago Tribune. She is at work on a new collection of stories, The Odditorium.
Honored by Sacred Heart Schools Atherton—her alma mater—for her social activism efforts, Pritchard is on the Executive Board of the Daywalka Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending human trafficking and modern day slavery. She is currently working to establish outreach projects with the Phoenix Children’s Hospital and Kalam: Margins Write (India) for the MFA Program at ASU, where she has taught since 1992.
For Melissa Pritchard's long vita, click here.