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Melissa Hardy

Goodreads Author

Born

in Chapel Hill, NC, The United States

Website

http://www.melissahardy.com

Twitter

Melissa Hardy-Treven@lissaht

Genre

Fantasy, Fiction, Young Adult

Member Since

August 2009

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I was born and raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Beginning in 1966 and for the next thirty years my father, novelist William Hardy, worked for the Cherokee Historical Association, first as Director of the symphonic drama Unto These Hills, which chronicles the events leading up to the Trail of Tears, the removal of the Cherokee to Oklahoma, then as its Producer. As a result I spent seven summers on the Qualla boundary, the reservation of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation. My 1995 short story collection, Constant Fire (Oberon) was set there and draws heavily on the history and mythology of that area.

Viking Press published my first novel, A Cry of Bees, in 1970 when I was a mere 17 years old. Don't ask me how that happened. Cry of B I was born and raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Beginning in 1966 and for the next thirty years my father, novelist William Hardy, worked for the Cherokee Historical Association, first as Director of the symphonic drama Unto These Hills, which chronicles the events leading up to the Trail of Tears, the removal of the Cherokee to Oklahoma, then as its Producer. As a result I spent seven summers on the Qualla boundary, the reservation of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation. My 1995 short story collection, Constant Fire (Oberon) was set there and draws heavily on the history and mythology of that area.

Viking Press published my first novel, A Cry of Bees, in 1970 when I was a mere 17 years old. Don't ask me how that happened. Cry of Bees is the story of a little girl growing up in a Southern Indiana boarding house full of decrepit old ladies. It's definitely what I'd call black humor. Out of print for many years, it can be found in most libraries and occasionally online at such sites as www.abebooks.com.

In the twenty-five year publishing hiatus which followed, I:
• took a BA in English with Honors in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• learned French, Latin, Italian, Greek and German
• earned an MA and All-But-Dissertation for a PhD in post classical history at the University of Toronto's Centre for Medieval Studies, writing on that fourth-century, neoclassical powerhouse, Athanasius of Alexandria.
• was awarded many scholarships, among them the Dumbarton Oakes Fellowship, Massey College Junior Fellowship, AAUW Fellowship, Connaught Fellowship and a Fullbright to Rome which I didn't take, but, hey, they gave it to me!
• became a Catholic and lapsed
• became an Italiophile and never lapsed
• suffered catastrophic illness in the form of Guillian-Barre Syndrome, which left me paralyzed and in hospital for a very long time
• learned to walk again
• raised three kids (Sabrina, Alice and William Miller), and acquired two more (Shanah and Raina Trevenna) when I married Ken Trevenna, a professional musician and Executive Director of Operations at the Ontario Institute of Audio Recording Technology (OIART). Ken hales from Northern Ontario, which provided me with both the inspiration and the setting for The Uncharted Heart and Surface Rights.
• worked as a journalist and business communicator, logging twenty one years and counting as the Director of Communications for the London and St. Thomas Association of REALTORS®.
In 1994 I won the Journey Prize for the most accomplished work to appear in a Canadian literary journal for Long Man the River, an excerpt from Constant Fire, originally published in Exile, then republished in both The Journey Prize Anthology (McClelland & Stewart) and Best Canadian Short Stories (Oberon, 1994). That was a blast. I was also nominated for the finalist for the Western Magazine Awards Program for fiction for The Ice Woman and my work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories of 1999, Best American Short Stories of 2001, Houghton-Mifflin and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, St. Martin's Press.

My most recent collection of short stories, The Uncharted Heart, is set in the Porcupine region of Northern Ontario around the time of the Gold Rush and was published in 2001 by Knopf Canada. It received the Canadian Authors Association Jubilee Award. My most recent novel is Broken Road, set against the historical backdrop of the events leading up to the Trail of Tears. It was published in October 2009 by Exile Editions.

The Geomancer’s Compass, published in 2012 by Tundra, is a young adult novel in which ancient Chinese cosmology and Augmented Reality work in conjunction to lay a generations-long curse.

Surface Rights, slated for publication with Dundurn Press in December 2013, is a contemporary novel about a middle-aged woman who travels to the family cottage to scatter the ashes of her husband, father and twin sister, onl ...more

127 posts
Melissa Hardy's Blog

My two cents

pro choice For what it’s worth.

I’m very grateful that I never had occasion to consider whether or not to have an abortion — all my pregnancies were wanted and planned — but that doesn’t mean I can’t imagine a situation where that was not the case. Bringing a child into the world is a weighty matter. Taking care of that child for the next twenty plus years is an even weightier one. No woman should be force

Combine Editions
Melissa Hardy’s books

Average rating: 3.67 · 307 ratings · 65 reviews · 14 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Oracle of Cumae 3.45 avg rating — 67 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Geomancer's Compass 3.18 avg rating — 44 ratings — published 2012 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Surface Rights 3.79 avg rating — 33 ratings — published 2013 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Uncharted Heart 4.08 avg rating — 12 ratings — published 2001 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Broken Road 3.71 avg rating — 7 ratings — published 2009 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Constant Fire 4.50 avg rating — 2 ratings — published 1995 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Cry of Bees it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 1970	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Demon Barrow: The Lives of Two Saints 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 1996	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	I Spoke to You: Before I Formed You 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Meistere die Kunst der Liebe! Ultimative Tipps: Für Singles und Paare 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

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May 03, 2014 05:40AM

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