Melanie Faranello is the author of the award-winning story collection, Everybody Needs Something, which received the 2025 Donald L Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Swamp Pink, Electric Literature, Hippocampus, StoryQuarterly, Blackbird, HuffPost Personal, Catamaran, Vol 1 Brooklyn, Vestal Review, and elsewhere, and have been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. Her novel manuscript was shortlisted for the Dana Awards for the Novel, William Faulkner’s Wisdom Competition, and won an Emerging Writer Award from Key West Literary Seminars. She holds her MFA from The New School. She received an Artist Fellowship Award from CT Office of the Arts and a Writer-in-Residence at Monson Arts. She has taught for over two decades in NYC, Chicago, and Hartford as a teaching artist with various organizations and communities. Originally from Chicago, she lives in West Hartford, CT and is the founder of Poetry on the Streets, a community engagement project. Read more online at www.melaniefaranello.com