Melanie Rae Thon

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Melanie Rae Thon (born 1957, last name pronounced Tone) is an American writer. She is a recipient of a Fellowship in Creative Arts from The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Whiting Writer's Award, the Hopwood Award, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Book Award, the Gina Berriault Award, and a Writer's Residency from the Lannan Foundation. In 2009, she was Virgil C. Aldrich Fellow at the Tanner Humanities Center.^{[citation needed]}

Thon's works include Silence & Song (2015); The 7^th Man (2015); The Bodies of Birds (2019); Lover (2019); and The Good Samaritan Speaks (2015). She is also the author of the novels The Voice of the River (2011); Sweet Hearts (2001); Meteors in August (1990); and Iona Moon (1993); and the story collections In This Light (2011); Girls in the Grass (1991); and First, Body (1997). Her work has been included in Best American Short Stories (1995, 1996); three Pushcart Prize Anthologies (2003, 2006, 2008); and O. Henry Prize Stories (2006). In 1996, Granta included Thon on its list of the Twenty Best Young American Novelists.

She has taught at Emerson College; the University of Massachusetts (Boston Campus); Syracuse University; and The Ohio State University. Originally from Montana, Thon now lives in Salt Lake City, where she teaches at the University of Utah.^{[citation needed]}

As a teacher, explorer, and writer, she is devoted to the celebration of diversity from a multitude of human and nonhuman perspectives, shattering traditional limits of narrative consciousness as she interrogates the repercussions of exile, slavery, habitat loss, genocide, and extirpation in the context of mystery and miracle, ecstasis, and the infinite wonder of cosmic abundance. Her work moves beyond and between genres, and might be considered poetry, prose, fiction, nonfiction—love songs and prayers, laments and confessions. She encourages her students to, no matter what, "touch the work every day."

Works[]

Books[]

• Meteors in August. Random House. 1990. ISBN 978-0-394-57664-0.
• Girls in the Grass. Random House. 1991. ISBN 978-0-394-57663-3.
• Iona Moon. Simon & Schuster. 1993. ISBN 978-0-671-79687-7.
• First, Body. Houghton Mifflin. 1997. ISBN 978-0-395-78588-1.
  • "Little White Sister," Originally Published in Ploughshares, Winter 1993-1994^[1]
  • "Xmas, Jamaica Plain," Originally Published in Granta 54: Best of Young American Novelists, Summer 1996^[2]
• Sweet Hearts. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2001. ISBN 978-0-395-78589-8.
• In This Light: New and Selected Stories. Graywolf Press. 2011. ISBN 978-1-555-97585-2.
• The Voice of the River. Fiction Collective 2. 2011. ISBN 978-1-573-66162-1.
• Silence & Song. Fiction Collective 2. 2015. ISBN 978-1-573-66053-2.
• The 7th Man. New Michigan Press. 2015. ISBN 978-1-934832-52-3.
• The Good Samaritan Speaks (Prompt 4). Prompt Press. 2015.
• Lover (Gallery Series 2). Prompt Press (limited fine art edition).
• The Bodies of Birds. New Michigan Press. 2019. ISBN 978-1-934832-68-4.

Stories[]

• "Catch You Later," Ploughshares, Fall 1987^[3]
• "The River Woman's Son," Ploughshares, Spring 1997^[4]
• "Letters in the Snow," One Story, Issue 40, June 2004^[5]

References[]

External links[]

• University of Utah Faculty Profile of Melanie Rae Thon
• "Translation", , September 15, 2006
• "The Light of Stars, Yes" by Melanie Rae Thon in "Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts" (26.1)
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
• Profile at The Whiting Foundation
• FC2
• Open Road Media
• Artist Profile
• Interview
• “Threshold of the Visible” and “The Toxic Sublime,” The Notre Dame Review: Summer / Fall 2018