MELISSA HARDY

I was born and raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Beginning in 1966 and for the next thirty years my father, novelist William Hardy, worked for the Cherokee Historical Association, first as Director of the symphonic drama Unto These Hills, which chronicles the events leading up to the Trail of Tears, the removal of the Cherokee to Oklahoma, then as its Producer. As a result, I spent seven summers on the Qualla boundary, the reservation of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation. My 1995 short story collection, Constant Fire (Oberon) was set there and draws heavily on the history and mythology of that area, as was a later novel, Broken Road (Exile Editions, 2009.)Viking Press published my first novel, A Cry of Bees, the story of a little girl growing up in a Southern Indiana boarding house full of decrepit old ladies, in 1970 when I was 17 years old. Out of print for many years, it can be found in most libraries and occasionally online at such sites as www.abebooks.com.

In the twenty-five-year publishing hiatus which followed, I took a BA in English with Honors in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA in post classical history at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies, suffered catastrophic illness in the form of Guillain-Barre Syndrome, raised three kids (Sabrina, Alice and William Miller), and acquired two more (Sophia and Raina Trevenna) when I married Ken Trevenna, a professional musician and CFO of the Ontario Institute of Audio Recording Technology (OIART) (Ken hales from Northern Ontario, which provided me with both the inspiration and the setting for my short story collection The Uncharted Heart and a later novel, Surface Rights); and worked as a journalist and business communicator, logging twenty five years as the Director of Communications for the London and St. Thomas Association of REALTORS®.

In 1994 I won the Journey Prize for the most accomplished work to appear in a Canadian literary journal for Long Man the River, an excerpt from Constant Fire, originally published in Exile, then republished in both The Journey Prize Anthology (McClelland & Stewart) and Best Canadian Short Stories (Oberon, 1994). I was also nominated for the finalist for the Western Magazine Awards Program for fiction for The Ice Woman and my work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories of 1999, Best American Short Stories of 2001, Houghton-Mifflin, and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, St. Martin’s Press.

The Uncharted Heart is set in the Porcupine region of Northern Ontario around the time of the Gold Rush and was published in 2001 by Knopf Canada. It received the Canadian Authors Association Jubilee Award. The Geomancer’s Compass, published in 2012 by Tundra, is a young adult novel in which ancient Chinese cosmology and Augmented Reality work in conjunction to lay a generations-long curse and Surface Rights, published in 2013 by Dundurn Press, is a contemporary novel about family and belonging. The Oracle of Cumae, published by Second Story Press, is set in the Italian Marches in the eighteenth century and was published in 2019.

Presently I am seeking a publisher for a collection of short stories set in a small lakeside village on the shores of Lake Erie – Orchard Beach -- and a novel about an apparition of the Virgin Mary set in North Carolina – The Virgin of Bright Leaf. I am currently working on a memoir.
I have been a Canadian citizen since 1991, although I retain my American citizenship, and make my home in Port Stanley, Ontario in a house overlooking Lake Erie with my husband of three decades and counting, Ken Trevenna.

CONTACT

Email me at:

melissa@melissahardy.com