About Me
Melissa Flores Anderson is a Latinx Californian and an award-winning journalist who lives on the edge of south Santa Clara County with her husband and young son, about a mile from the home she grew up in. She has a master’s in print journalism from the University of Southern California and worked for eight years as a reporter and editor before moving into public relations. She currently works as a communications officer for a university in Monterey and spends her evenings on creative writing pursuits. Her first full-length short story collection, “All and Then None of You” is forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree in September 2025.
Flores Anderson has received a 2023 Pushcart Prize nomination for her creative nonfiction piece “Another Scandinavian” from Latin@ Literatures. She has also received three Best of the Net nominations: a 2023 nomination for “Six Gun Fights” from Variant Lit for CNF, a 2024 nomination for “By the Numbers” from Raw Lit Magazine for CNF, and a 2024 nomination for “Curbing the Appetite” from IceBreaker Lits for a co-authored fiction piece she wrote with Tiffany Storrs and Gavin Turner.
She has served as guest co-editor for two special issues of Roi Rainéant Press with François Bereaud on the theme of “Heat” in June 2022 and “Cold” in January 2022. She is the author of more than four dozen short stories, poems and creative nonfiction pieces published or featured in reading series since the beginning of 2021.
She is querying her first novel-length manuscript, THE IRISH MONTHS, a coming-of-age story that spans two decades that is BROWN GIRLS meets IN FIVE YEARS. Words left unsaid and lost paper notes aren’t enough to keep Latinx Katie Perez (19) and Irish Cian Kelley (27) from reuniting after they lose touch at the end of her months-long study abroad program. But when they see each again decades later, it’s not quite in the way they both imagined.
She is working on a second novel manuscript set at a small-town paper in 2010, when the combination of a housing market bubble burst and a proliferation of new technology brought print media to its knees. She has an idea percolating for a third novel-length manuscript if she ever finds time to write it.
Flores Anderson published her first chapbook in April 2024 withJAKE the Anti-Literary Magazine. It is a CNF collection of nine essays entitled “A Body in Motion” that explores identity, healthcare and motherhood with vulnerable and tender pieces. She has a novelette with Emerge Literary Journal, “Roadkill,” co-authored with François Bereaud. In addition, she has creative nonfiction and fiction pieces forthcoming in two anthologies and regularly publishes work in online and print journals.
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