Friday Five: Q&A with novelist and poet Melissa Powers

‘The best poems are those that don’t really end.’

Continuing our tribute to poets during National Poetry Month, today’s Friday Five is with Melissa Powers, a poet, novelist and non-fiction writer.

Melissa Powers

Melissa is an award-winning author whose work has appeared in Common Boundary, American Literary Realism, The Quest, Midwest Poetry Review, Writer’s Journal, and Cave Region Review. Her books include The Outsiders (2006), an instructional guide on the novel; Afterthoughts (2012), a collection of poems; and three works fiction, including two young adult science fiction novels, Spark and Surfacing (Amazon, 2012, 2014) . Her awards include the Springfield (Missouri) Writer’s Guild Grand Prize for Poetry (1998), the Johnson Memorial Grand Prize Award — League of Minnesota Poets (2003), the William Stafford Award — Washington Poets Association (2009), and the Writer’s Journal poetry contest (2011). She holds an M.A. from Missouri State University and was a college English instructor for more than 25 years at Drury University, Missouri University of Science and Technology, and East Central College. Currently, she is a student success specialist/writing tutor at East Central College, a freelance academic editor specializing in dissertations, theses, journal articles, and book projects, and a staff writer for The Phelps County Focus newspaper. Melissa’s recent poetry can be found on the Facebook group Melissa Ann Poetry.

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Friday Five: Q&A with short story writer Doug Brown, author of ‘My Bohemian Baptism and Then Some’

Doug Brown, author of My Bohemian Baptism and Then Some

I discovered the short stories of Doug Brown thanks to an interview of him a couple of months ago on the podcast Short Story Today (which I highly recommend), and I have since delved into his collection of short stories, My Bohemian Baptism and Then Some (Serif Press, 2023). What immediately struck me about Doug during the interview was his background, which is similar to mine. After a 40-year career in marketing and management, he is focusing on his passion for writing fiction. He also describes his formative years as a “feral youth,” which is a fitting description of my early years. Follow Doug on X/Twitter at @DougBrownFables.

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