June Melby
Nonfiction
Decorah, IA
June Melby is at Ragdale revising a collection of poetry, and working on a second book of nonfiction. She is the author of My Family and Other Hazards, a memoir about the retro 1950s miniature golf course her family ran for 30 years. It was a NYT Bestseller, and winner of the Midwest Connections award. Her writing has appeared in “Midnight Feasts” (a children’s poetry anthology, Bloomsbury UK); “The Bedford Reader”; “Ilanot Review”; “Muse/ A Journal”; “Forklift, Ohio”; “Versal”; “Fugue”; “Los Angeles Review of Books”; “Utne Reader”; “McSweeney’s Internet Tendency”; and “The LA Weekly.” As a performance poet, she has featured on literary stages, festivals, and art museums in the U.S. and in Europe as a solo artist or with her band “June Melby and Her Future Enemies.” She was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Arts, awarded a Marcus Bach Fellowship, and winner of the City of Hamburg Kulturbehorde International Artists Award and Residency. She received an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa, and currently lives in a log cabin in the woods of Iowa with her husband and a twenty-pound cat named Ferdinand Magellan.