Melanie Tafejian is a poet and educator living in Raleigh, North Carolina. She holds an MFA in Poetry from North Carolina State University, where she won the 2020 North Carolina State Poetry Contest. She was awarded second place in the William Matthews Poetry Prize judged by Ilya Kaminsky and has poetry forthcoming in Raleigh Review and Asheville Review.

"While at Township 10 I will be working on my poetry manuscript in progress. The book is all things gluttonous and indulgence, lots of food, and sex. Some poems inspired by Dutch Master’s paintings and themes of wrestling with desire and guilt. My work is heavily influenced by my travels, most recently this has meant the landscape of Albania. Uninterrupted thought is essential to the writing of poems and the time to sit with ideas in the mountains of North Carolina is an incredible gift."