About
Melanie Rock is a native New Yorker, Bronx-bred and Hudson Valley-based. She’s a musician/essayist/poet/mom, and what her one-time astrologer called “a highly conflicted Leo.” She holds a BMus from NYU, a Writing MFA from Columbia University, and identifies as a multi-ethnic WOC.
Her writing explores the power of labels, the reactive impetus of art-making, and the American obsession with codification as applies to self and other.
Melanie has blogged extensively on the experience of living ambiguously brown, at http://browngirlcleansup.blogspot.com. She is currently shopping a memoir manuscript titled Browngirl Cleans Up, a story of growing up biracial amid alternating social attitudes and rules.
Her fantasy literary dinner party guests include Joan Didion, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Hilton Als, Patti Smith, and Dave Eggers. The next morning, they would all go shoe shopping.