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.
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 two dozen short stories, poems and creative nonfiction pieces published or featured in reading series since the beginning of 2021. She regularly has more than two dozen pieces in need of revision, and thanks her writing group and critique partners for invaluable feedback.
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 at a time 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 has her first novelette forthcoming in February 2024 from Emerge Literary Journal. “Roadkill,” co-authored with François Bereaud, will be available in print and e-book.
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