Melissa Balmain is a humorist, poet, journalist, and teacher. Since 2012 she has edited Light, the country's longest-running journal of light verse (founded in 1992). Balmain's poems and/or prose have appeared in The American Bystander, American Life in Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, Ecotone, The Hopkins Review, Lighten Up Online, Literary Matters, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, The New Criterion, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New Verse News, Poetry Daily, Rattle, Slackjaw, The Spectator (UK), Verse Daily, The Washington Post, Weekly Humorist, and many anthologies.

Her first full-length poetry collection, Walking in on People (Able Muse Press, 2014), was chosen by X.J. Kennedy for the Able Muse Book Award. Her latest books are the short collectionThe Witch Demands a Retraction: Fairy-Tale Reboots for Adults, illustrated by Ron Barrett (Humorist Books, 2021), and the full-length collection Satan Talks to His Therapist (Paul Dry Books, September 2023).

A former columnist for Success magazine and other publications, Balmain is the author of a memoir, Just Us: Adventures of a Mother and Daughter (Faber and Faber). She has received national honors for her journalism, including the National Society for Newspaper Columnists humorous columnist award and multiple Pulitzer Prize nominations. In poetry, she won the 2020 Poetry by the Sea sonnet award and has been a finalist for the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award (twice), and the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award. She teaches at the University of Rochester and lives nearby with her husband and—now and then—their two children. You'll find recent interviews and readings with Balmain here here, here, and here.