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.

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.

Melissa grew up in a hilltop house in Baltimore. She now lives with her family in Richmond, Virginia, where she spends summers raising tree frogs.