Melissa Bank is the author of the international bestseller The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999) and The Wonder Spot (2005). Her work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, Epoch, Glamour, The Guardian, O: The Oprah Magazine, Ploughshares, Seventeen, and The Washington Post, and has been broadcast on NPR, PRI and the BBC. She is the 1993 recipient of the Nelson Algren Award for the Short Story, and her work has been translated into 30 languages. Bank is a graduate of Cornell’s MFA program in creative writing, and is also Visiting Writer in that program during the spring semester of 2009.
Bank read from her work on February 20, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place the previous week.