Melanie Hoffert is the author the memoir, Prairie Silence, which won the 2014 Minnesota Book Award for Memoir and Creative Nonfiction. Her work has been published in several literary journals including Ascent, Orion, and The UTNE Reader. Her essays have won creative non-fiction prizes from both the Baltimore Review and New Millennium Writings. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and a BA in writing from Concordia College. She divides her time between her home in Minneapolis and a cabin near Battle Lake, Minnesota. She’s working on a book about water.