Melany Neilson
Melany Neilson (born Moses Lake, Washington, December 1, 1958) is an American author. She grew up in Ebenezer, Mississippi, and graduated from the University of Mississippi with a degree in English in 1979, and a Masters degree in journalism in 1986.
Her first book, Even Mississippi, a memoir of Southern politics, was published in 1989, and received the Lillian Smith Award, the Mississippi Authors Award, the Gustavas Myers Outstanding Book on Human Rights, and a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Neilson chronicled her work with Robert Clark, an African-American member of the Mississippi Legislature, who was the Democratic Party nominee for U.S. Congress in 1982 and 1984, and her own "evolution as a white among blacks, seeking a new Mississippi."[1] Neilson first met Clark in 1967 when she was 9 years old and Clark had become the first African-American elected to the Mississippi state legislature since Reconstruction.[2]
Her first novel, The Persia Café, was published in 2001 to wide praise.[3] The story of a race murder set in a small Mississippi River town in 1962, the novel explores identity, friendship, family, community and race in a turbulent time in American history. A month after the book's publication, publisher HarperCollins identified eight separate sentences similar to sentences in[4] Barbara Kingsolver's 1988 novel The Bean Trees. Neilson immediately changed the eight sentences and her publisher, St. Martin's, printed them in future editions.[5] According to St. Martin's, Neilson apologized in a letter to Kingsolver for "the unintentional inclusion of the language in question," and offered to apologize in person.[4]
Neilson is married to Frederick G. Slabach, President of Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Texas and Former Executive Officer of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation.[6] They have three children.