We're thrilled to announce that Melanie Perish , Tee Iseminger, Angela Spires and Melissa Sigg will be featured for our August Reading!

Melanie Perish is a poet and writer, student, and teacher. She is a member of Poets & Writers, Inc., has done Poets in the Schools in New York and Utah, and has served on the Scholarship Committee of the Women’s Writing Workshops in upstate New York (1978 - 1983.) Her poems have appeared in Utah Holiday, Sinister Wisdom and Desertwood: An Anthology of Nevada Poets edited by Shaun Griffin. Her chapbooks include Notes of a Daughter from the Old Country (Motheroot Publications) and Traveling the Distance (Rising Tide Press).

In 2011, Black Rock Press published Passions & Gratitudes, a collection of her poems. Melanie is a Director of Development, Emerita, at the University of Nevada, Reno where she had the privilege of working in Development for the University Foundation for nine years and the College of Engineering for eighteen years. She cannot imagine living away from the Sierra Nevada Mountains or the Grace that resides in its sky.

Tee Iseminger returned to fiction and poetry four years ago after more than 15 years in journalism and advertising. She's now an alumni of the Squaw Valley Writer's Workshop and UNR's Creative Writing Program, and is working on a first novel , a collection of short stories and poems. In 2014, she received the Sierra Arts Grants-to-Artists Literary Award, and early this year won third place in the Sixfold Literary Journal's Summer Poetry Contest. She lives in Reno.

Melissa Siig is co-owner of the Tahoe Art Haus & Cinema in Tahoe City and an associate editor at Moonshine Ink. Before moving to Tahoe in 2001, she worked in international politics in Washington, DC where she earned her master's in Arab Studies at Georgetown University. After opting for a major career change, Melissa returned to the West Coast where she fell in love with the people and lifestyle in Tahoe. She started work as a reporter for the Tahoe World and has written for various local and national publications including ESPN.com, Poweder.com, Alaska Airlines, Reno-Gazette Journal, Tahoe Quarterly, and Nevada Magazine. For the past eight years, she has been at Moonshine Ink where she writes feature stories and local news, focusing on controversial issues in Squaw Valley. Melissa has won numerous awards for her writing, including most recently Best Environmental Reporting from the National Newspaper Association for her story about how the drought is impacting the Truckee River. She has been working on her memoir "And Then We Said Goodbye," for the last few years. When not writing, she is busy with her three children, puppy and playing outside.

Angela Spires is a lecturer at the University of Nevada, Reno in the English Department. She writes in multiple genres but she specializes in flash fiction. Her work has been published in multiple journals.