ABOUT
Melody Nixon (she/they) is a pākehā (non-Māori/settler) writer, editor, and artist living between the Bay Area, California, and Aotearoa New Zealand. She holds an interdisciplinary PhD, with emphases in Literature and Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies, from the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research addressed race and contemporary poetry and visual art in Te Moana-nui-a-kiwa, with a particular focus on whiteness studies and settler colonial being. They currently advise creative writing Masters students at Columbia University, and lecture in the Master of Creative Performance Practice at Toi Whakaari O Aotearoa.
Melody's essays, criticism, fiction and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The London Review of Books, Contemporary HUM, Landfall, ReadingRoom, Literary Hub, BOMB Magazine, Guernica, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, Public Books, Entropy Magazine, Cura Magazine, Midnight Breakfast, No Dear Magazine, Gutter Magazine, Bloom, Positionen, Hoax Publication, The Pariah Anthology from SFASU Press, and Columbia Journal, among others. Their artistic projects have been performed in or documented by USF Bergen, Norway (2015); Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany (2016); Tinos Quarry Platform, Greece (2016, 2017); Arte Digeribile, Italy (2016); Emergency Index by Ugly Duckling Press, Brooklyn (2017), Melodie Michel, UC Santa Cruz (2018). They have been interviewed by The Hairpin, and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, and appeared on The Anti-Americana podcast.
From 2013-2020 Melody was the Interviews Editor of Amherst College-based literary and arts journal The Common, and for three years she was Co-Curator of the Harlem, NYC performance series First Person Plural. Melody is the Co-Founder of Apogee Journal, a literary activist project that combines aesthetics, politics, and community. And with novelist Noelle Harrison they co-founded Aurora Writers' Retreats in the UK and Ireland in 2017.
Melody holds an MFA in nonfiction creative writing from Columbia University, and is represented by Renee Zuckerbrot of MMQLit Literary in New York City. She is currently completing a lyric memoir on grief, trauma, and settler colonial being.
