Melissa Faliveno is the author of the essay collection Tomboyland, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, the New York Public Library, O, The Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature and Debutiful, and the recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her essays, interviews and reviews have appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Bitch, Brevity, Literary Hub, Ms., The Brooklyn Rail, Autostraddle, No Tokens and Prairie Schooner, among others, as well as in the anthology Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic.

A first-generation college graduate, Faliveno received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College. She has taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence, Kenyon College, Denison University and Catapult, as well as to incarcerated men, high school students and adults in and around New York City. She is currently the Margaret R. Shuping Fellow and an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

A former senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, Faliveno is also the co-founding editor of Black Rabbit Review, a zine of art and literature based in the Black Rabbit bar in her longtime neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She is a singer and guitarist in the band Self Help. Her debut novel, Hemlock, is forthcoming Jan. 20, 2026, from Little, Brown.