BIOGRAPHY I grew up in suburban Boston with a first-generation Sicilian American mother and a father from a tiny Nova Scotia fishing village. The first in my family to complete college, I understood early on how culture and class shape one’s life. I began writing in earnest after years working in the fields of justice and public health. In 2019 I graduated from the GrubStreet Writers memoir incubator and went on to residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Craigardan, and the Elizabeth Bishop House in Nova Scotia. My creative nonfiction has been published in Ruminate, Windhover Journal, Blue Mountain Review, and Birdcoat Quarterly as well as the 2024 anthology of writing by women, Ms. Aligned: Coming of Age. Since 2008 I have taught in the Writing Program at Boston University.
PERSONAL STATEMENT As a lonely kid, I used to climb up to the roof and read purloined poetry books while sitting in the crook of the chimney. Keats, Emerson, and Shakespeare were friends who valorized life in a working-class suburb. But the arts were not a practical field of study, so I went on eventually to work for the US Department of Justice, where I was tapped to write everything from briefing papers to talking points for political appointees.
After nearly a decade, I quit my government job for a life with space in which to write. My plans were temporarily sidelined when I got married and had a child. But I rose before dawn to bang away on my computer while my infant slept. Much of that work was eventually published. What I wrote about then was what I write about now: the legacy of family history, parts known and unknown. My immigrant forebears’ energy and resources went to survival and assimilation; they stuffed their grief, shame, anger and secrets in the deep basement of memory. For me, writing is like opening dusty boxes in the family archives, a ritual decluttering and discovery that makes room for greater self-knowledge…and compassion for the many stories waiting to be told.
2025
Melanie S Smith 