About

Biography
B.A. in English (Emphasis in Creative Writing), Minor in Philosophy
University of Southern California

As a graduate of the University of Southern California, Melissa is the first person in her family to attend college. She cofounded TAYO Literary Magazine and is one of its board of directors. As creative director, Melissa leads TAYO’s creative marketing, branding identity, art curation, and public relations. Professionally, she is a production editor at Arcadia Publishing, a leading publisher that captures the diverse pockets of American history.

In 2011, Melissa was accepted into the prestigious fiction workshop for colored writers, Voices/VONA, which was hosted by UC Berkeley. She has worked with many authors on her craft, such as Aimee Bender, Percival Everett, ZZ Packer, and Naomi Benaron, winning three awards for her writing. Melissa won the Miguel G. Flores Prize awarded by the nonprofit Philippine American Writers & Artists, Inc. and won second place in the Undergraduate Virginia Middleton Creative Writing Prize held by the USC PhD in Literature & Creative Writing School for her short story, Her Eyes Round Like Coconuts. In the 2010 Undergraduate Writers’ Conference at USC, she won honorable mention in the creative writing category, placing third out of 200 submissions. Melissa has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her work has been published or is forthcoming in Maganda Magazine, Lantern Review, Kartika Review, Tidal Basin Review, Kweli Journal, and the anthology of Philippine Speculative Fiction, Volume 7.