Melissa Valentine

Melissa Valentine is an award-winning writer from Oakland, California, whose work explores themes of race, trauma, and healing. Her debut memoir, The Names of All the Flowers, was the 2019 winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize. She is a 2020 artist fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts in Nonfiction Literature. Melissa has also been a fellow at the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Her writing has appeared in New York Magazine, Guernica, Jezebel, and Apogee, among others. She is a visiting professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.