The VCU Visiting Writers Series hosts a reading by acclaimed author Melissa Faliveno.

Faliveno is the author of the essay collection Tomboyland, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, and Debutiful, and recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Bitch, Brevity, Literary Hub, Ms. Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, Autostraddle, No Tokens, and Prairie Schooner, among others, and in the anthology Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic. A first-generation college graduate, Melissa received a BA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She has taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence, Kenyon College, Denison University, Catapult, and to incarcerated men, high school students, and adults in and around New York City, and is currently the Margaret R. Shuping Fellow and assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The former senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, Melissa is also the cofounding editor of the Black Rabbit Review, a zine of art and literature based out of the Black Rabbit bar in her longtime neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and is a singer and guitarist in the band Self Help. Her debut novel, Hemlock, is forthcoming January 20, 2026 from Little, Brown.