Melanie Pappadis Faranello

Melanie Pappadis Faranello is an award-winning writer, teaching artist, creator of Poetry on the Streets, and author of the story collection, Everybody Needs Something, which won 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 founded 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 and collaborates with many non-profit orgs working to create social impact through the arts. 

She has taught with a wide variety of community orgs, schools and universities, and  created independent projects for over two decades in NYC, Chicago, Hartford, and Ecuador. She conducted field research Nepal, recording oral folklore from Limbu people in the Northeast Himalayas to preserve culture. 

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