Melissa Febos

Melissa Febos

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Bio

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart and two essay collections: Abandon Me, a Lambda Literary Award finalist and Publishing Triangle Award finalist, and Girlhood, a national bestseller. Catapult will publish a collection of her craft essays, Body Work, on March 15, 2022. She is a recipient of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from Lambda Literary and of fellowships from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the BAU Institute at the Camargo Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Barbara Deming Foundation, and others. Her essays have appeared in the Paris Review, the Believer, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Granta, the Yale Review, Tin House, the Sun, and the New York Times Magazine. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.

What an honor to be supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, for the gift of money which becomes time in which to ruminate, whisper, read, and wander through a set of new ideas. In this case, it will be those pertaining to my fifth book: a long essay that combines memoir and research to examine the global history of female celibacy, and more broadly, divestment as a feminist practice. When I got news of this gift, I almost immediately imagined my child self—who was exactly as prone as I am now to rumination and wandering and craving the time to drift through new ideas—and thought, Look!