Melissa Balmain

Melissa Balmain is a humorist, journalist, and teacher. Her first full-length poetry collection is Walking in on People, which was chosen by X.J. Kennedy for the Able Muse Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The American Bystander, American Life in Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Lighten Up Online, Literary Matters, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, The New Criterion, The New Verse News, Poetry Daily, The Spectator (UK), Verse Daily, The Washington Post, and many anthologies; her prose in the New Yorker, the New York Times, McSweeney’s, The Satirist, and elsewhere. A former columnist for Success magazine and other publications, Balmain is the author of the memoir Just Us: Adventures of a Mother and Daughter (Faber and Faber).

Balmain has received national honors for her journalism, including the National Society for Newspaper Columnists humorous columnist award and multiple Pulitizer Prize nominations. In poetry, she won the 2020 Poetry by the Sea sonnet award and has been a finalist for the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award (twice), and the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award.

Since 2012, Balmain has edited Light, the country's longest-running journal of light verse. She teaches at the University of Rochester and lives nearby with her husband and two children.