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Melanie Figg

Experimental, Literary, Poetry

With 30 years of teaching expertise, Melanie Figg is a skilled and generous writing instructor. She brings humor and compassion to her workshops and offers lots of practical advice for her private clients.

About the Artist

Melanie Figg (MFA, PCC) is the author of the award-winning poetry collection, Trace (named one of the Best Inde Books of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews), and a poetry chapbook, Hurry, Love. She is currently working on a hybrid memoir. Melanie's poems, personal essays, and book reviews are published or forthcoming in dozens of literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Nimrod, The Rumpus, and the American Poetry Review. She has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County, and others. Her work has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes. Melanie teaches writing throughout the MD-DC-VA area, as well as privately. As a certified professional coach, Melanie offers women’s writing retreats and works 1-1 with writers to demystify the business of writing, to build sustainable writing routines, to finish their projects, and to find more confidence and ease as a writer. 

Melanie Figg website Melanie Figg

Artist's Statement

Coming soon!

Featured Work

Photos

The award-winning poetry collection, Trace, received a prestigious Kirkus starred review and was named one of the "Best Indie Books of 2020." “The stunning poems in Melanie Figg’s debut full-length collection, Trace, exist in a sublime and terrifying world filled with visual art, human atrocity, and a complex family history, including a sister that serves as a mirror and window into the forces that formed them both. These poems are breathtaking in their braided complexity, unwillingness to settle for two-dimensional revelation, and ability to face the abyss and sing, symphonically, into it. The two long, sectioned poems, “Untitled” and “Leaving a Trace,” are the crowning jewels of this book and illuminate Figg’s tremendous gift on the page, “forming perfect sentences / of evidence and sorrow.” --Allison Benis White

Videos

  • Poems from Trace

    See more information about Poems from Trace
    In this 17-minute video, Melanie Figg reads six poems from her poetry collection, Trace. The reading is a slide show of images bringing the poems to life.
    Year: 2020