Melissa Febos

Melissa Febos is the bestselling author of Whip Smart, Abandon Me—a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist and Publishing Triangle Award finalist, Girlhood—LAMBDA Award finalist, and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. She is a recipient of awards and fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The British Library, the Barbara Deming Foundation, MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has recently appeared in The Paris Review, The Sun, The New York Times Magazine, Kenyon Review, Vogue, and New York Review of Books. Febos is an associate professor at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly. While in residence at BMI, she will be working on her fifth book, The Dry Season, a work of mixed-form nonfiction that combines research and memoir to explore celibacy as a liberatory practice.