Melissa Elmes (Ridley Elmes)

Writing across speculative and literary genres, my poetry and fiction focus on the intersections, tensions, and collisions of relationships and cultural and societal expectations; making, exploring, fracturing, and re-viewing myths, folktales, and legends; engaging historical materials in literary imaginative and fantastical revisionism and bringing historical dimensions of language, craft, and form into conversation with modern sensibilities, and the hidden worlds and dark corners in our minds and imaginations. My priority as a writer is to offer my readers something to linger over, to think and feel with, to engage intellectually, and to enjoy on a belletristic level. As a writer/scholar, my scholarship deeply informs my creative work, while my creative work provides accessible popular avenues for aspects of my scholarship, creating a synergistic relationship between my academic and creative endeavors which organically functions as a form of public humanities, transforming my scholarship into vehicles that engage audiences with literary interests in non-traditional ways.

My poetry and fiction have appeared in a variety of print and online venues including Eye to the Telescope, Star*Line, Illumen, Haven, Spectral Realms, Liquid Imagination, Black Fox, PoetrySouth, Red Coyote, Gyroscope, In Parentheses, Thimble, Reunion: The Dallas Review Online, Heartwood, and World of Myth. My first book of poetry, Arthurian Things: A Collection of Poems, was published by Dark Myth Publications in 2020 after winning their Open Contract Challenge, and was nominated for the Elgin award for best book of speculative poetry by the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 2022. My poetry has also been longlisted for the SFPA Dwarf Star and Rhysling awards for best short speculative poem and for the Pushcart Prize.