Melanie Sumner

Melanie Sumner (born December 30, 1963) is an American writer and college professor. She was acclaimed as one of "America's Best Young Novelists" in 1995. 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."

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

Career From 1988 to 1990, Sumner taught English in Senegal with the Peace Corps. 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.

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.

Her third novel, The Ghost of Milagro Creek, was published in July 2010 by Algonquin. 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. 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.

Publications

Books

Short stories

"My Other Life." Best of the South: From Ten Years of New Stories from the South (1997) Algonquin Books. "The Guide." Living on the Edge: Fiction by Peace Corps Writers (1999) Curbstone Press. "Marriage." Long Story Short: Flash Fiction from 64 of North Carolina's Finest Writers (2009) University of North Carolina Press. "My Other Life." StoryQuarterly (1993) Her husband David died from Lou Gehrig's Disease in 2002. She has two children, Zoë and Rider.