Author photo by Tania del Carmen Fernandez
About Melissa Scott Sinclair
Melissa Scott Sinclair is a fiction writer, essayist and award-winning journalist. She is a 2025 Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow, as well as the recipient of the 2023 Lit/South Award in Fiction and the 2021 Michael Kenneth Smith Novel Fellowship. Her debut children’s picture book, ONE LITTLE SHELL (co-authored with Shawn Miller), is forthcoming in 2028 from Sleeping Bear Press.
Melissa’s bylines have appeared in Slate, The Washington Post, Audubon, Richmond magazine, Style Weekly and other publications. She is also a contributor to WILD LIFE: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Living Wonders from Atlas Obscura. Her journalism has been recognized by the Virginia Press Association, the Virginia Outdoor Writers Association, and the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.
Her creative nonfiction has been published in Parhelion, the Streetlight Magazine 2021 Anthology and Nine Lives: A Life in 10 Minutes Anthology. Melissa’s short story “Everything Must Go” appeared in the anthology Richmond Macabre.
She is a longtime volunteer and current board member of the James River Writers, a nonprofit that inspires and connects the writing community in central Virginia.
Fun Facts
On her mother’s side, Melissa is descended from Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. On her father’s side, she is descended from the Scottish Clan Sinclair, builders of Rosslyn Chapel and legendary guardians of the Holy Grail.
If you’ve seen National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code, you know what this means: Any day now, Melissa will embark on a globe-spanning quest for some fabled artifact.
While waiting for a mysterious map to appear in the mailbox, Melissa spends time gardening, reading, working on her Halloween haunted trail, hanging out with family and friends, and not cleaning her house.
Melissa loves learning and writing about misunderstood animals: hermit crabs and horseshoe crabs, snakes and toads, spiders and wasps. She is obsessed with the baby tree frogs who metamorphose in her pond each summer, then depart to begin their arboreal lives.
Melissa has never been able to whistle, jump rope, or do a cartwheel, although she did recently learn to roller skate. She can vibrate her eyes, which is a rare and useless talent called voluntary nystagmus. She has only one kidney, because she gave the left one away.
