Melissa Beneche is an Instructor of English at St. Thomas University. She holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from Syracuse University and a B.A. in Creative Writing from Florida State University.

Her work was shortlisted for the 2022 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and she is a runner-up for the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award from the Key West Literary Seminar. She has received residencies from Tin House, the Ucross Foundation, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Her stories – about Haitian, Haitian American, and African American girls and women urged and haunted by religion, sisterhood, communal grief, and more – have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Bennington Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and other publications. She is especially interested in the intersections of faith and the diaspora. In her writing classes, she aims to elevate voices that have been traditionally omitted, forgotten, or silenced; and to disrupt master narratives about race, the environment, and more. She lives and writes in Lauderhill, Florida.