About Melissa Fay Greene

Essay by Melissa Fay Greene

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Melissa with her husband, Don Samuel, and their children (Molly is not shown)

Melissa Fay Greene was born in Macon, Georgia; spent most of her childhood in Dayton, Ohio; and graduated from Oberlin College in 1975, after which she returned to Georgia. Greene has been a contributor to NPR, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, LIFE, Good Housekeeping, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Readers Digest, Ms., The Wilson Quarterly, Redbook, and Salon.com. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, Don Samuel, a criminal defense attorney. They have been married for 28 years and are the parents of Molly, Seth, Lee, Lily, Fisseha, Jesse, and Helen Samuel.

Her first book: Praying for Sheetrock (1991).It tells the story of a "courthouse gang" on the rural coast of Georgia and the black community that tried to dislodge it. A finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, Sheetrock was named to the list of 100 works of print, radio, television, and photography cited as the best American jounalism of the 20th century.

The Temple Bombing (1996), about a notorious episode during the massive white resistance to de-segregation in the 1950s in the Deep South, also was a National Book Award Finalist and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, the Georgia Author of the Year Award, and the ACLU National Civil Liberties Award.

Last Man Out (2002), about how the surviving hero of the 1958 Springhill, Nova Scotia, mine disaster was insulted and racially segregated during a PR-stunt all-expenses-paid trip to the Georgia coast, was named a best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune, the Toronto Globe & Mail, the Cox newspaper chain, and the New York Public Library.

There is No Me Without You (Bloomsbury, 2006) tells the story of a middle-class Ethiopian widow, who opens her door to AIDS-orphaned children and is inundated by them, beyond her capacity to care for them all. It won the Elle Magazine "Readers Prize for Nonfiction," and has been named a "Best Book of 2006" by Publishers Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Columbus Dispatch, the Anchorage Press, and The Oregonian (see all Book Reviews & Profiles). It has been optioned by Dreamworks.