Melissa Fay Greene
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Melissa Fay Greene (born December 30, 1952, in Macon, Georgia) is an American journalist and author. A 1975 graduate of Oberlin College, Greene is the author of four books of nonfiction.
Praying for Sheetrock (1991), the true story of the often-criminal heyday of the good old boys in McIntosh County, Georgia on the rural coast of Georgia and the rise of civil rights there, won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Quality Paperback Book Club New Visions Award, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the 100 best works of American journalism of the 20th century by the journalism faculty of New York University.[1]
The Temple Bombing(1996)investigates an incident of domestic terrorism during the era of “massive resistance" to desegregation in Atlanta in the 1950s with an attack on a Jewish synagogue called The Temple. The book was a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, the Georgia Author of the Year Award of the Georgia Writers Association, the Georgia Historical Society Award, [2] the Hadassah Myrtle Wreath Award, and the American Civil Liberties Union National Civil Liberties Award.
Last Man Out (2002), the story of the 1958 Springhill, Nova Scotia, mine disaster Springhill mining disaster was named a best book of the year by the Chicago Tribune, the Toronto Globe, the Cox newspaper chain, and the New York Public Library.
There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Save Her Country’s Children (2006) [3] illuminates the Ethiopian orphan crisis caused by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africathrough the portrait of a middle-aged Ethiopian foster mother and the dozens of children crossing her threshold. Winner of Elle Magazine’s Elle’s Lettres Readers Prize, a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, a Notable Book for the American Library Association and for Booksense, and named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, Christian Science Monitor, Entertainment Weekly, Chicago Tribune, and The Atlanta Constitution. There Is No Me Without You has been translated into 15 languages.
Greene has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Life Magazine, Good Housekeeping, The Atlantic, Readers Digest, The Wilson Quarterly, Redbook, and Salon.com, and has been a frequent guest on NPR.
Greene lives in Atlanta with her husband, Don Samuel, a criminal defense attorney and partner in the firm Garland, Samuel & Loeb. They are the parents of nine children: Molly, Seth, Lee, Lily, Jesse (adopted from Bulgaria in 1999), Helen, Fisseha, Daniel, and Yosef (adopted from Ethiopia in 2002, 2004, and 2007). Molly Samuel graduated from Oberlin College in 2004 and works for ForestEthics in San Francisco; Seth Samuel graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory in 2007 and is pursuing a Masters in Music at NYU; Lee Samuel is a freshman at Oberlin College and the younger six children live at home.
