HER AWARD-WINNING BOOKS HAVE FOCUSED ON THE WORLD'S SOCIAL INEQUALITIES, AND ON INDIVIDUAL LIVES TRANSFORMED BY THE SEARCH FOR JUSTICE. HER MAGAZINES ARTICLES HAVE RANGED FROM BLUEGRASS TO ZOO DESIGN TO THE MCCAUGHEY SEPTUPLETS AND OTHER HAZARDS OF MOTHERHOOD.

Melissa Fay Greene was born in Macon, Georgia; spent part of her childhood in Dayton, Ohio; and graduated from Oberlin College in 1975, after which she returned to Georgia and lived in Savannah, Athens, and Rome, before moving to Atlanta.

She was a first-hand observer to the events described in her first book: Praying for Sheetrock (1991), the story of a "courthouse gang" on the rural coast of Georgia and the black community that tried to dislodge it. A finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, Sheetrock was named to the list of 100 works of print, radio, television, and photography cited as the best American journalism of the 20th century.

The Temple Bombing (1996), about a notorious episode during the massive white resistance to de-segregation in the 1950s in the Deep South, also was a National Book Award Finalist and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, the Georgia Author of the Year Award, and the ACLU National Civil Liberties Award.

Last Man Out (2002), the story of the 1958 Springhill, Nova Scotia, mine disaster was named a best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune, the Toronto Globe & Mail, the Cox newspaper chain, and the New York Public Library.

There is No Me Without You (Bloomsbury, 2006) tells the story of a middle-class Ethiopian widow, who . out of the multiple tragedies in her own life . opens her door to AIDS-orphaned children and is inundated by them, beyond her capacity to care for them all. It tracks the ups-and-downs of her life (from public adoration to denunciation and prison) and follows closely the stories of a dozen stricken families and children, while touching upon the scientific and social history of the pandemic. It won the Elle Magazine's "Elle's Lettres Readers Prize for Nonfiction," and has been named a "Best Book of 2006" by Publishers Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Columbus Dispatch, the Anchorage Press, and The Oregonian (see Book Reviews). It has been optioned by Dreamworks.

Greene has been a contributor to NPR, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, LIFE, Good Housekeeping, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Readers Digest, Ms., The Wilson Quarterly, Redbook, and Salon.com. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, Don Samuel, a criminal defense attorney. They have been married for 28 years and are the parents of nine children: Molly, Seth, Lee, Lily, Jesse (adopted from Bulgaria), Fisseha, Daniel, Yosef, and Helen (adopted from Ethiopia). Daughter Molly Samuel works for ForestEthics in San Francisco; Seth is pursuing a Masters in Music at the NYU/Steinhardt School of Music; Lee is a freshman at Oberlin College; and everyone else lives at home, often expressing disappointment with what is being served for dinner.

You can learn more about Melissa at www.MelissaFayGreene.com.