Melanie Pappadis Faranello

Melanie Pappadis Faranello is an award-winning writer, community artist, and author of the story collection, Everybody Needs Something, which received the 2025 Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. Her fiction and essays have been published widely in Swamp Pink, StoryQuarterly, Electric Literature, Hippocampus, Vol 1. Brooklyn,HuffPost Personal, Blackbird, Catamaran and elsewhere. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, 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. Recipient of an  Artist Fellowship Award  from CT Office of the Arts and a Writer-in-Residence Award from Monson Arts and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She holds her MFA in creative writing from The New School. Originally from Chicago, she lives in West Hartford, CT, where she's at work on a novel, teaches, and leads community projects.

She's the founder of Poetry on the Streets, an artist-led social practice engaging communities and bringing 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. She has taught for over two decades throughout NYC and Chicago and is an active teaching artist in Hartford. Her international experience includes living in Cuenca, Ecuador and studying and conducting field research on oral folklore in Nepal. She's also the founder of Sunday Salon Chicago Reading Series (2004) and Hartford's  Sonder Reading Series (2026).