About the Book:
In this intrepid debut essay collection, Melissa Faliveno traverses the liminal spaces of her childhood in working-class Wisconsin and the paths she’s traveled since, compelled by questions of girlhood and womanhood, queerness and class, and how the lands of our upbringing both define and complicate us even long after we’ve left. Part personal narrative, part cultural reportage, TOMBOYLAND navigates midwestern traditions, mythologies, landscapes, and lives to explore the intersections of identity and place. From F5 tornadoes and fast-pitch softball to gun culture, strange glacial terrains, kink party potlucks, and the question of motherhood, TOMBOYLAND asks curious and critical questions about belonging and the body, isolation and community, and what we mean when we use words like woman, family, and home.
About Melissa:
Melissa Faliveno is the author of the debut essay collection, TOMBOYLAND, published by Topple Books in August 2020 and named by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, and Debutiful as a Best Book of 2020. Her essays and interviews have appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Bitch, Ms Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, the Millions, Prairie Schooner, and DIAGRAM, among others, and received a notable selection in Best American Essays. Born and raised in small-town Wisconsin and a first-generation college graduate, Melissa holds a BA in English and creative writing from the University of Wisconsin and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where she has taught in the graduate writing program and Writing Institute. She was the 2020-21 Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC–Chapel Hill, and beginning in fall 2021 will be a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College. She has also taught creative writing to incarcerated men, high school students, and adults, and has led talks, interviews, workshops, and panels about writing and publishing at conferences across the United States and abroad. The former senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine and producer and cohost of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast, Melissa was previously an editor at Trails Books, a small nonfiction press focused on Midwestern travel, sports, and culture; and a freelance features writer and columnist for Isthmus, Madison, Wisconsin’s alt weekly. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is the cofounding nonfiction editor of the Black Rabbit Review and a singer and guitarist in the band Self Help, which released its first LP, Maybe It’s You, in Fall 2018. She is represented by Adriann Ranta Zurhellen of Folio Literary.
Follow Melissa:
Twitter: @melissafaliveno
IG: @mlfaliveno
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Twitter: @SituationStory
IG: @situationandstory
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TOMBOYLAND w/Melissa Faliveno