Beck Series: Essayists Melissa Febos and Melissa Faliveno

The Beck Series welcomes essayists Melissa Febos and Melissa Faliveno. 

Melissa Febos is the bestselling author of four books, most recently, “Girlhood,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and “Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative.” She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, The Black Mountain Institute, The British Library, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, the New York Times Magazine, The Best American Essays, and Vogue. She is a full professor at the University of Iowa.

Melissa Faliveno is the author of the essay collection “TOMBOYLAND,” named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, and Electric Literature, and recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her work has appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Bitch, Lit Hub, Brevity, and Brooklyn Rail, among others; received a notable selection in Best American Essays; and appears in the anthology Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic. The former senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, she has taught creative writing at Denison University, Kenyon College, and Sarah Lawrence College, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and on the MFA faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.