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. She holds her MFA in creative writing 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 in West Hartford, CT, where she is at work on a novel and runs community projects as a teaching artist.

She is also the creator of Poetry on the Streets, a recognized project engaging communities in creative 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. 

She has taught widely over two decades throughout NYC and Chicago, and she's an active teaching artist in Hartford, where she develops and facilitates workshops in various communities and in collaboration with organizations. Her international experience includes teaching in Cuenca, Ecuador and  conducting field research on oral folklore in Nepal.

She is the founder of the original Sunday Salon Chicago Reading Series (2004) and the new reading series in Hartford,  Sonder Reading Series (2026). 

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.