I believe in the power of words to penetrate deeply and subtly into real past worlds and events; I disdain the use of words to distort, conceal or rearrange when performed in the name of nonfiction.
Nonfiction Mentor
Melissa Fay Greene is the author of six books of nonfiction: Praying for Sheetrock (1991), The Temple Bombing (1996), Last Man Out (2003), There Is No Me Without You (2006), No Biking in the House Without a Helmet (2011), and The Underdogs (2016). She is also the Kirk Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Agnes Scott College as well as a Distinguished Professor of Practice at UGA’s Grady College of Journalism.
Greene’s work has been translated into a dozen languages and has been honored with two National Book Award nominations, a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the ACLU Civil Liberties Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and induction into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. Sheetrock was named one of the Top 100 Works of American Journalism of the 20th Century by a panel convened by NYU. She has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Newsweek, and other periodicals. Recent work has included “30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact” for The Atlantic; “They Can’t Kill Us All”: These Scholars Lost Their Countries and Found Each Other” for Mother Jones; and a series of election-year “postcards” from Georgia” for The Washington Post.
A Macon native and 1975 graduate of Oberlin College, Melissa and her husband, defense attorney Don Samuel, are the parents of nine, the in-laws of four, and the grandparents of four.