Melanie Thernstrom

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Melanie Thernstrom (b. 1965) is an author and freelance journalist who frequently writes about murders and true crime.

She is the daughter of Abigail Thernstrom, a prominent neoconservative political scientist, and Stephan Thernstrom, the Winthrop Professor of American History at Harvard.

Thernstrom attended Harvard University; her senior honors thesis was entitled Mistakes of Metaphor, an account of the murder of her best friend, Roberta Lee, three years earlier, allegedly by Lee’s boyfriend. Thernstrom's poetry professor showed it to literary agents, and she soon received an advance of $367,000. The Dead Girl, which was published by Pocket Books in 1990, was a combination of literary theory and true crime. Harold Brodkey noted "I like this book better than In Cold Blood."

Thernstrom's second book, Halfway Heaven: Diary of a Harvard Murder, was about Sinedu Tadesse, a Harvard junior who murdered her roommate and then committed suicide while living at Dunster House 1995.

In 1999, Thernstrom wrote a lengthy Vanity Fair article on murdered college student Matthew Shepard^[1].

Thernstrom has taught creative writing at Cornell, Harvard, and the University of California, Irvine. She has written pieces for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and her writing regularly appears in The New York Times Magazine.