Melany Neilson

Melany Neilson (born Moses Lake, Washington, December 1, 1958) is an American author. She grew up in Ebenezer, Mississippi, and graduated from the University of Mississippi with a degree in English in 1979, and a Masters degree in journalism in 1986.
Her first book, Even Mississippi, a memoir of Southern politics, was published in 1989, and received the Lillian Smith Award, the Mississippi Authors Award, the Gustavas Myers Outstanding Book on Human Rights, and a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Neilson chronicled her work with Robert Clark, the Democratic Party nominee for U.S. Congress in 1982 and 1984, and her own "evolution as a white among blacks, seeking a new Mississippi." Neilson first met Clark in 1967 when she was nine years old and Clark had become the first African-American elected to the Mississippi state legislature since Reconstruction.
Her first novel, The Persia Café, was published in 2001 to wide praise. The story of a race murder...