Melissa Range was born and raised in East Tennessee. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a “Discovery”/The Nation prize, and a writing fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in the Hudson Review, Image, the Paris Review, and other journals. Currently she is pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Missouri–Columbia, where she is a David R. Francis Fellow.

Other poems by Melissa Range in Verse Daily:
February 19, 2009:   "The Battle-Axe" "Because not every yeoman can afford..."

Books by Melissa Range:

Other poems on the web by Melissa Range:
Three poems
Three poems
"New Heavens, New Earth"
"Lampblack"

Melissa Range's Blog.

Melissa Range's Website.

Melissa Range According to Wikipedia.

Melissa Range on Twitter.

About Horse and Rider:

"Every so often, one is reminded why poetry matters, how poetry makes matter, how it provides to our experience such substantial and necessary weight with so light a thing as breath. . . . Say these poems aloud, and witness a joy that fills the mouth, delights the heart, and nudges the imagination to respond in kind. This is the best collection I’ve read in many years."
—Scott Cairns

"It’s been a long time—too long—since we heard a music like Melissa Range’s in our poetry. The alliterative play of her splendid voice and her joy in metaphorical naming would be as recognizable to the author of Beowulf as to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Like Hopkins and young W. H. Auden, she has rediscovered and revived the Anglo-Saxon blood and bone of English. And like them, I believe, Melissa Range is going to have a lasting impact."
—Mark Jarman

"Melissa Range is a wordsmith, . . . unabashedly interested in the sound, force, and color of language. Her influences are many, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Emily Dickinson to George Herbert. Her sources, too, are beautifully various—myth, the Bible, Old English riddles, a beloved Tennessee rural landscape—in all of which she finds “that soaring force that finds its power in adoring.” . . . Reading Horse and Rider is a thrilling experience."
—Elizabeth Spires