Melissa Chadburn’s writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, The Best American Food Writing and many other publications. Her extensive reporting on the child welfare system appears in the Netflix docuseries "The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez." Melissa is a worker lover and through her own labor and literary citizenship strives to upend economic violence. Her mother taught her how to sharpen a pencil with a knife, and she's basically been doing that ever since. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Southern California and lives in greater Los Angeles.

Books by Melissa Chadburn

A Tiny Upward Shove

by Melissa Chadburn - Fiction

Marina Salles’ life does not end the day she wakes up dead. Instead, in the course of a moment, she is transformed into the stuff of myth, the stuff of her grandmother’s old Filipino stories --- an aswang, a creature of mystery and vengeance. She spent her time on earth on the margins. Shot like a pinball through a childhood of loss, she was a veteran of Child Protective Services and a survivor, but always reacting, watching from a distance, understanding very little of her own life, let alone the lives of others. Death brings her into the hearts and minds of those she has known --- even her killer --- as she accesses their memories and sees anew the meaning of her own.