Professor, Department
of English, College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences
Education
B.A. in Comparative Religions, University of California, Santa
Barbara, M.F.A., Vermont College
Bio
Professor of English and Women's Studies at Arizona State University,
Melissa Pritchard is the nationally acclaimed author of four short
story collections: Spirit Seizures, The Instinct for
Bliss, Disappearing Ingenue and The Odditorium; four
novels: Phoenix, Selene of the Spirits, Late
Bloomer and V (forthcoming); as well as a biography:
Devotedly Always, Virginia: The Life of Virginia Galvin
Piper. A recipient of numerous prestigious literary awards,
including the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Carl Sandburg Award, the
James Phelan Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best fiction
by an American woman and fellowships from the National Endowment for
the Arts, The Writers Voice YMCA, and Brown University's Howard
Foundation, Pritchard's fiction has appeared widely in such literary
journals as: The Southern Review, Boulevard,
Open City, A Public Space, Ecotone, Gulf
Coast, The Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions,
and The Paris Review. Her stories are frequently cited and
reprinted in anthologies such as: Pushcart Prize XX and
XXVI; Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards;
Best American Short Stories; The Prentice Hall
Anthology of Women's Literature; Best of the West;
Great Contemporary Ghost Stories; Mothers: Twenty
Stories of Contemporary Motherhood; and American
Gothic Tales, as well as college textbooks such as:
Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and
Advanced Writers; Behind the Short Story: From First to
Final Draft; and A Garden of Forking Paths: An Anthology
for Creative Writers. Her non-fiction has appeared in The
Collagist, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, O, The Oprah
Magazine, among other journals, magazines and anthologies.
Pritchard has received the Claudia Ortese Memorial Lecture Prize in
North American Literature from the University of Florence and her
fiction has been translated into Spanish and Italian. Her novel
Selene of the Spirits was selected for the Barnes and Noble
“Discover Great New Writers” series and her short story
collection, Disappearing Ingenue, featured in Doubleday's
“Fiction for the Rest of Us” series, was chosen by Alan
Cheuse for National Public Radio's 2002 Annual Summer Reading List.
Her novel Late Bloomer, published by Doubleday in 2004, has
been called “brilliant” by Publishers Weekly in
a starred review, “ravishing” by Vanity Fair
magazine, and was named a 2004 Best Book of the Year by the
Chicago Tribune. Her newest collection of stories, The
Odditorium, received rave nation-wide reviews and was an Oprah
Book of the Week, as well as a San Francisco Chronicle's Reader's Choice.
She has been nominated for and received numerous service awards at
ASU, where she has taught since 1992. She was a Hawthornden Fellow in
2008 in Scotland, a Bogliasco Fellow in 2011 in Italy and a fellow at
the Lavigny Chateau, a writer's residency, in 2012 in Switzerland. In
2009, after returning from Afghanistan where she was an embedded war
journalist, she founded the Ashton Goodman Fund, to raise money for
the Afghan Women's Writing Project. In May, 2011, Melissa directed a
staged reading of "Out of Silence" at ASU, with MFA students
reading poems by Afghan women and girls, to raise money for AWWP. She
is currently working on journalism pieces on child slavery, global
de-mining efforts and women's bookclubs in Arizona prisons.
For more information, please see her website at www.melissapritchard.com
