Melanie Sumner Explained

Melanie Sumner
Education:Darlington School
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (BA)
Boston University (MFA)
Birth Place:Middletown, Ohio, U.S.
Birth Date:30 December 1963
Occupation:writer, college professor
Awards:Whiting Award

Melanie Sumner (born December 30, 1963) is an American writer and college professor.[1] She was acclaimed as one of "America's Best Young Novelists" in 1995.[2] Writer Jill McCorkle says, "She comes to her characters with this wealth of knowledge. She's so well-versed in those wonderful little details that make up Southern towns. She has such a rich expanse of her fictional turf wildly varied and yet always occupied with this kind of social manners and morals and taboos."[3]

Sumner is an associate professor of English at Kennesaw State University.

Early life

Sumner was born in Middletown, Ohio. When she was seven years old, her family moved to Rome, Georgia where she grew up.

She graduated from Darlington School in 1982. She received a BA in religious studies at the University of North Carolina in 1986. There, she was a member of the literary fraternity St. Anthony Hall. She received an MFA in creative writing at Boston University in 1987.[4] [5]

Career

From 1988 to 1990, Sumner taught English in Senegal with the Peace Corps. She has taught at various colleges, including Cape Fear Community College (1990–1993), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1995–1996), the University of New Mexico (1998–2001), and Shorter College (2002–2008). Currently, she is an associate professor of English at Kennesaw State University. While at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995 and 1996, she was a writer in residence.

She has published many short stories and several novels. Her short stories have appeared in Atlanta, Harper's Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and StoryQuarterly. In 1994, her short story "My Other Life" was selected for inclusion in the anthology New Stories from the South: The Year's Best 1994, published by Algonquin Books.[6] Published in 1995 by Houghton Mifflin, her first book was Polite Society, a novel told through a series of short stories is about a young woman from Tennessee who serves as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal.[7]

In her second novel, The School of Beauty and Charm, Sumner portrays an adolescent girl raised in an affluent, Christian-oriented Southern family who struggles under the pressure from her parents to become a “proper young lady," getting involved in alcohol and drugs. It was published in 2002 of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, now Simon & Schuster.[8]

Her third novel, The Ghost of Milagro Creek, was published in July 2010 by Algonquin.[9] The ghost of a medicine woman called Abuela narrates this story of star–crossed lovers set in a mixed community of Native Americans, Hispanics, and whites of Taos, New Mexico.

Her fourth novel, How To Write a Novel was published in August 2015 by Vintage, a Random House imprint.[10] Its plot pulls from aspects of Sumner's own life, telling the story of a 12-year-old girl who moves to a small town in Georgia after her father dies with her mother who is an English professor.

Awards

Publications

Books

Short stories

Novels

Anthologies

As editor

Journals.

Personal life

Sumner spent some twenty years as "a Southern expatriate downplaying her accent and poking fun at her roots." She has lived in Senegal, New Mexico, Alaska, and Provincetown. Around 2001, she moved back to Rome, Georgia due to an illness in her family.[14] Her husband David died from Lou Gehrig's Disease in 2002. She has two children, Zoë and Rider.

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Georgia Authors: Melanie Sumner . Georgia Center for the Book . 13 December 2018 . 15 December 2018 . https://web.archive.org/web/20181215223408/http://www.georgiacenterforthebook.org/Georgia-Literary-Map/Georgia-Author-Detail.php?record_id=149 . dead .
  2. Web site: The 2009 Georgia Literary Festival Georgia Center for the Book Supporting Libraries, Literary Programs and Georgia's Rich Literary Heritage . 2022-05-19 . www.georgiacenterforthebook.org.
  3. "Profile: Writer Melanie Sumner." Morning Edition, 30 Aug. 2001. Gale Academic OneFile, Accessed 19 May 2022.
  4. Web site: Melanie Sumner . 2022-05-19 . www.whiting.org.
  5. Web site: Melanie Sumner . 2022-05-19 . National Endowment for the Arts . en.
  6. Web site: 1994-01-01 . Fiction Book Review: New Stories from the South 1994: The Year's Best by Shannon Ravenel . 2022-05-19 . www.publishersweekly.com.
  7. Web site: Polite Society . 2022-05-19 . Melanie Sumner.
  8. Book: The School of Beauty and Charm . 2002-12-01 . 978-0-7434-4644-0 . en.
  9. Web site: The Ghost of Milagro Creek . 2022-05-19 . Workman Publishing . en-US.
  10. Web site: How to Write a Novel by Melanie Sumner - PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books . PenguinRandomhouse.com . 13 December 2018.
  11. May 2018 . May Speakers . Equill: Atlanta Writer's Club . 6.
  12. Web site: Selected Works - Melanie Sumner . 2022-05-19 . Kennesaw State University.
  13. Web site: Boulevard - The Monster by Melanie Sumner . 2022-05-19 . richardburginblvd.tripod.com.
  14. Web site: Morning Edition: Melanie Sumner . www.npr.org . 13 December 2018.

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