Image of the poet Lynn Melnick.
Photo by Timothy Donnelly.

Lynn Melnick is the author of Refusenik (YesYes Books, 2022), Landscape with Sex and Violence (YesYes Books, 2017), and If I Should Say I Have Hope (YesYes Books, 2012). She is also the author of the memoir I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton (University of Texas Press, 2022) and a coeditor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015). Her poetry has appeared in APR, The New Republic, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Poetry magazine, and A Public Space. Her essays have appeared in air/light, LA Review of Books, ESPN, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture.

Melnick has received grants from the Cafe Royal Cultural Society and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and the 92Y.

Born in Indianapolis, Melnick grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn.