Hi, I’m Melissa.

I am a poet, essayist, and collector of things most people walk past.

I write about the body and all the weather it carries. Desire, grief, memory, rage, tenderness, faith, and the strange experience of being a person who has always felt everything a little too closely.

Most of my work begins the same way: something catches my attention. A sentence. A memory. A sensation I cannot name. I follow it until it gives me language.

Poetry is where I make something beautiful from it.

Essays are where I ask why.

A woman with curly hair sitting on a chair outdoors at night, illuminated by warm light, with a dark hill and starry sky in the background.

I have been writing for as long as I can remember, although for much of my life it was something I did privately. A way of understanding myself before I had language for many of the ways I experienced the world.

Eventually, I began sharing those words. Somewhere along the way, The Poet Alchemist became less of a name and more of a description of what I had always been doing: taking what hurt, confused, delighted, frightened, or fascinated me and turning it into something I could hold.

My first collection, Body Full of Weather, is an exploration of that interior landscape.

When I am not writing, I am usually chasing some other form of wonder—running under the night sky, wandering cemeteries, collecting rocks, taking photographs, listening to records, baking something unnecessarily complicated, or disappearing down whatever rabbit hole has caught my attention that week.

I live in Texas and am currently working on whatever my brain decides to hand me next.