BIO | Melodie Bolt literary poet & writer

Melodie Bolt’s publishing started in 2002 but was interrupted by a crime committed against her family, a diagnosis of Bipolar, and raising three children. You might think love would be hard to find for someone with PTSD and rapid cycling Bipolar, but her partner, who spent a life sentence of 36 years in prison, finds her mood swings amusing, keeps her on track with medication, and calls her out when she’s distracted. He also has jokes. Managing Bipolar is a lifelong task that requires flexibility and the ability to start over, frequently. Despair is a real thing and so is mania.

One way she manages to write is her critique group The Flint Area Writers. FAW was founded in the 1930s as a writing club. She’s been a frequent member since 2004.

Melodie has also learned flexibility by moving frequently, 14 times, and has lived in many places such New Jersey, Baltimore, Memphis, Pittsburgh, Austin, and Flint, where she currently resides. She understands how location influences culture which is why she chose Flint as the hometown for her debut novel, Fix. Although Flint is well known for the Water Crisis, which Melodie is a part of, she’s found many beautiful places and people in the city which has a can-do attitude for rebuilding. Many of the places she writes about in her novel Fix are real landmarks in the city.

Her favorite poet, Lynda Hull, also found beauty in gritty urban settings. Melodie studied Hull’s work while earning an MFA –in Writing from Pacific University in Oregon where she focused specifically on poetry. She worked with the poets, Marvin Bell, David St. John, and Kwame Dawes. She first started writing poetry in 5th grade when she stumbled across Edgar Allan Poe. She wrote 12 pages of poetry and placed them in a photo album with Red Rose tea bag tabs for her mother. The poetry was rhymed and not very good, but we all start somewhere.

Now, her poetry is both literary and speculative. She has published poetry in places like Verse Wisconsin, Paper Dragon, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has also appeared in Tales of the Unexpected (TOTU), the Shantytown Anomaly, and Black Spot Book’s women in horror showcase of poetry Under Her Skin. She has a forthcoming piece in 2023 in Black Spot’s collection Under Her Eye. She is also a lifetime member of SFPA, Science Fiction Poetry Association. Poetry is awesome for her Bipolar mind because it’s short to read and short to write.

Her fiction was inspired by British gothic classic writers Charlotte Brontë, Sheridan LeFanu, Wilkie Collins and contemporary American writers Frank Herbert, Joan Vinge, and Roger Zelazny. Melodie reads poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. She has a non-fiction piece forthcoming this October in Death’s Garden Revisited. Reading Patricia Briggs, Larry Correia, Pierce Brown, and Holly Black keeps her Bipolar mind occupied and her writer mind curious.

For eight years, Melodie taught at an urban right-to-try Flint college where she helped students prepare for Composition 101. She has a Master’s of English –Composition and Rhetoric from University of Michigan –Flint. She also has taken Master’s classes at University of Southern California for Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL).

Melodie’s Bipolar has also inspired international travel to Spain, Italy, Crete, Iceland, Russia, the Ukraine, and the country of Georgia. She’s studied several languages Spanish, French, German, and Russian and she’s fluent in none of them.

She tried several sports including fencing where she participated in Nationals and earned Maryland Jr. Female Fencer of the Year. She also learned how to ride English on a Morgan mare, and how to swim at the age of 21 by an instructor who never got in the water.

7 Interesting Facts about Melodie Bolt you may not know:

Her dog. Dr. Thomas Bork, was cited in a chemistry academic journal.
Her enneagram type is Advocate.
Her Myers-Briggs type is INFP.
She’s a Pisces.
She’s an LGBTQ Ally.
She enjoys playing the video games Spyro and Diablo.
She’s pagan.

6 words that people use to describe her are, in no particular order:

Brilliant.
Funny.
Empathetic.
Tender.
Loving.
Beautiful.

She keeps her therapist employed. Being a fiction writer requires fierce determination to finish a work and then to move on and complete revision. Currently, she is working on a sequel to Fix and a collection of poetry.

Awards:

Recipient of the James Tiptree Jr. Fairy Godmother Award.
Finalist - Speculative Literature Foundation, Working Writers Grant, 2016.

Former President, Melodie has been a member of the Flint Area Writers for over a decade. You can also follow her on Facebook or Twitter @Melodie_Bolt.

She is a lifetime member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association.