About

Melissa is a Puerto Rican writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion Magazine, Lonely Planet, Chowhound, Atticus Review, Catapult, The Caribbean Writer, Puerto Rico Review, Santa Rabia Poetry, Revista Kametsa, Revista La Raíz Invertida, and the Italian journal Il Detonatore, among other publications. She contributed a chapter on environmental justice in Vieques, Puerto Rico, to The World We Need (The New Press, 2021), and published her first book, La narrativa activista de Rosario Ferré (McGraw-Hill Spain), in 2020. Melissa holds a master’s degree in Latin American literature from the University of Barcelona, an MFA in writing from Mountainview, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Caribbean literature. She was a Book Project fellow at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, where she later taught personal essay and memoir courses for years. She is now pitching her first poetry collection, a memoir in verse, and writing an autobiographical novel that revisits her adolescence.​