Living on the Borderlines ― Stories

For the loosely connected Seneca community members living in Upstate New York, intergenerational memory slips into everyday life: a teenager struggles to understand her grandmother's silences, a family seeks to reconnect with a lost sibling, and a young woman searches for a cave that's called to her family for generations. With these stories, debut writer Melissa Michal weaves together an understated and contemplative collection exploring what it means to be Native.
Melissa Michal's work has appeared in The Florida Review, Yellow Medicine Review, and others. She currently teaches Native American/Indigenous literatures at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Melissa Michal is of Seneca decent. She teaches creative writing and literature and loves helping students find that they too can write. She is a fiction writer, essayist, photographer, and a professor. She has her MFA from Chatham University, MA from The Pennsylvania State University, and her PhD in literature from Arizona State University where she focuses on education and representation of Indigenous histories and literatures in curriculum. She has been grateful to read at the National American Indian Museum in DC and Amerind Museum in Dragoon. Melissa has work appearing in The Florida Review, Yellow Medicine Review, and other places. She was a finalist for the Louise Meriwether first book prize. She has a novel completed and is working on her nonfiction essay collection.