Melanie Pappadis Faranello

Melanie Pappadis Faranello is an award-winning writer and author of the debut story collection, Everybody Needs Something, which received the 2025 Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Swamp Pink, StoryQuarterly, Electric Literature, Hippocampus, Vol 1. Brooklyn, Permafrost, HuffPost Personal, Blackbird, Literary Mama, Catamaran and elsewhere, and been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. Her novel-in-progress won an Emerging Writer Award from Key West Literary Seminars, shortlisted for the Dana Awards and William Faulkner's Wisdom Competition. She holds her MFA from The New School and has attended Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers Conferences.  She received of an  Artist Fellowship from CT Office of the Arts and a Writer-in-Residence Awards from Monson Arts and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. Originally from Chicago, she lives outside Hartford, CT, where she is at work on a novel and creates various community projects.

She is also the creator of Poetry on the Streets, a recognized participatory project engaging communities in self-expression and bringing people's words into public spaces. A Creative Community Fellow with National Arts Strategies and global-cohort member of The Pollination Project's Greenhouse, for artist change-makers, Melanie is involved with many non-profit orgs working for social impact through the arts. 

As a teaching artist, she has taught widely over two decades in NYC, Chicago, Hartford, and Ecuador, as well as conducted field research in Nepal in oral Limbu folklore.

Her belief in creative writing and stories as a vehicle for connection and a means to explore human experiences is the thread that connects her community engagement work with her work as a writer. To work with Melanie, visit the Contact Page.