Melissa Ridley Elmes is the author of Arthurian Things; A Collection of Poems, winner of the JayZoMon Open Contract challenge and nominated for the 2022 Elgin Award for best book of speculative poetry by the Science Fiction Poetry Writers Association. Her fiction and poetry appear in a variety of literary journals and popular magazines, including Star*Line, Eye to the Telescope, Spectral Realms, Illumen, Haven, Gyroscope, In Parentheses, Thimble, Heartwood, and World of Myth. A medieval scholar and associate professor of English and gender studies, she has authored articles on various subjects including the Arthurian and Robin Hood legends, Chaucer, women and gender in medieval literature, medievalism, and pedagogy, and she is the co-editor of an introduction to literature textbook (Lenses: Perspectives on Literature, Second Edition) and co-editor of Food and Feast in Premodern Outlaw Tales (Routledge, 2021) and Melusine's Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth (Brill, 2017). She has held fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library and with the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts.
