Melanie Tafejian is a writer and educator from the Pacific Northwest. She won the 2021 Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize and was a finalist for both the 2023 Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize and the 2023 Southern Humanities Review Auburn Witness Prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, The Georgia Review, Nimrod, Poetry Northwest, and The Los Angeles Review, among other journals. She was a 2022 mentor with the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program. Melanie serves on the editorial staff for The Raleigh Review and received an MFA from North Carolina State University, where she now lectures in the First Year Writing Program.