Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, WHIP SMART (St. Martin’s Press 2010), whose “electrifying prose and unremitting honesty” Kirkus Reviews said, “expertly captures grace within depravity.” Among other places, she has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Anderson Cooper Live, CNN, The Atlantic and Tin House online, Guernica, and New York magazine. Her writing has been published and anthologized widely, in venues including Glamour, Kenyon Review, Post Road, Hunger Mountain, Salon, Dissent, The Brooklyn Rail, New York Times, Bitch Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, The Rumpus, The Beauty Anthology, The Moment Anthology, and Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York. For seven years, she has co-curated and hosted the popular Mixer Reading and Music Series in Manhattan, and is the recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She has taught writing at Purchase College, The New School, NYU, Sarah Lawrence, Utica College, and the Institute of American Indian Arts, among other places, and is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at Monmouth University. Selected by Lia Purpura as the winner of the 2013 Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Contest, she is the recipient of a 2013 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Artist Grant, a 2012 Bread Loaf Nonfiction Fellowship, a 2014 Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellowship, and MacDowell Colony fellowships in 2010, 2011, and 2014. The daughter of a sea captain and a psychotherapist, she was raised on Cape Cod, and lives in Brooklyn.
Free and Open to the Public