Melanie Rae Thon

Melanie Rae Thon (born 1957, last name pronounced Tone) is an American writer. She is a recipient of a Fellowship in Creative Arts from The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Whiting Writer's Award, the Hopwood Award, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Book Award, the Gina Berriault Award, and a Writer's Residency from the Lannan Foundation. In 2009, she was Virgil C. Aldrich Fellow at the Tanner Humanities Center.

Thon's works include Silence & Song (2015); The 7^th Man (2015); The Bodies of Birds (2019); Lover (2019); and The Good Samaritan Speaks (2015). She is also the author of the novels The Voice of the River (2011); Sweet Hearts (2001); Meteors in August (1990); and Iona Moon (1993); and the story collections In This Light(2011); Girls in the Grass (1991); and First, Body (1997). Her work has been included in Best American Short Stories (1995, 1996); three Pushcart Prize Anthologies (2003, 2006, 2008); and O. Henry Prize Stories (2006). In 1996, Granta included Thon on its list of the Twenty Best Young American Novelists. 

She has taught at Emerson College; the University of Massachusetts (Boston Campus); Syracuse University; and The Ohio State University. Originally from Montana, Thon now lives in Salt Lake City, where she teaches at the University of Utah.

As a teacher, explorer, and writer, she is devoted to the celebration of diversity from a multitude of human and nonhuman perspectives, shattering traditional limits of narrative consciousness as she interrogates the repercussions of exile, slavery, habitat loss, genocide, and extirpation in the context of mystery and miracle, ecstasis, and the infinite wonder of cosmic abundance. Her work moves beyond and between genres, and might be considered poetry, prose, fiction, nonfiction—love songs and prayers, laments and confessions.