Melinda Moustakis was born in Fairbanks, Alaska and grew up in California. She is the author of the novel Homestead, which is about two unlikely homesteaders in 1950’s Alaska and is loosely based on her maternal grandparents. Her linked story collection Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories won the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Maurice Prize, and was a 5 Under 35 selection by the National Book Foundation. She holds an MA from University of California, Davis and a PhD from Western Michigan University.

Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Alaska Quarterly Review, Granta, Kenyon Review, New England Review and elsewhere. Her story “They Find the Drowned” won an O. Henry Prize. She is the recipient of the Hodder Fellowship from The Lewis Center of the Arts at Princeton University, the NEA Literature Fellowship in Fiction, the Kenyon Review Fellowship at Kenyon College, the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington Fellowship at George Washington University, and the Rona Jaffe Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

She has taught at Kenyon College, Pacific Lutheran College, and George Washington University. For two years she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at UC Davis and taught graduate fiction and non-fiction workshops, undergraduate literature and fiction workshops, and advised nine fiction thesis projects. She was recently the 2023 Distinguished Writer in Residence at Wichita State and worked with graduate students on their fiction thesis projects and is currently looking for teaching positions.