A portrait of the author and educator Melora Wolff. She is a white person, with blonde hair in a layered bob. She is wearing a lavender top and a light blue shawl. She is leaning against the wall of a marble building that may be on a college campus. There is a pillar in the background.
photo credit: Elizabeth Haynes

Melora Wolff’s collection of personal essays, Bequeath, is available from LSU Press (2024). The collection includes “Masters in This Hall,” (Best American Essays Notable Essay; Pushcart Prize Special Mention), “Fall of the Winter Palace,” (Pushcart Prize Special Mention) and “Mystery Girls” (BAE Notable Essay/Thomas Wilhelmus Prose Award). 

Melora’s essays and hybrid works have been in many publications, among them Brick, the Normal School, Salmagundi, the Southern Review, Speculative Nonfiction, the Chronicle Review, and the New York Times. Her short fiction has appeared in Best New Writing and Best American Fantasy (ed. Jeff Vandermeer). She is recipient of Nonfiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Yaddo, and MacDowell, and of The Philip Roth Writing Residency from the Stadler Center for Poetry and the Arts. Long ago, she was a playwright, and a singer.

A graduate of Brown University and of Columbia University’s MFA program in Fiction, she is Associate Professor of English at Skidmore College where she directs the creative writing program and teaches writing workshops in nonfiction, fiction, visual art, and film.