melissa r. sipin | writer

“I’m compelled, I’m speaking of myself as a black man, to doubt my history, to examine it; I’m compelled to try to create it. I’m trying to excavate my history from all the rubble that has been buried for so many hundreds of years. And that means I have to question everything.”

— JAMES BALDWIN in the 1965 Cambridge Union debate with William K. Buckley

Melissa R. Sipin is a writer from Carson, California. They won Submittable’s Eliza So Fellowship (2017), Poets & Writers’ McCrindle Fellowship (2016), Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open (2013), and the Washington Square Review’s Flash Fiction Prize (2014). They co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things, an anthology on Philippine myths (Carayan Press 2014), and their work is in LitHub, Salon, Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, Guernica Magazine, 580 Split, and SLICE Literary Magazine, among others. Their fiction has won scholarships and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Kundiman Fiction Retreat, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and they are represented by Sarah Levitt at Aevitas Creative Management. They are hard at work on a novel inspired by their grandmother’s capture in WWII Philippines and the recovery of repressed memories as a survivor of intergenerational trauma.