Melinda palacio biography

Melinda Palacio (’09) is a poet, author, and speaker. She lives in Santa Barbara and New Orleans. Her poetry chapbook, Folsom Lockdown, won Kulupi Press’ Sense of Place 2009 award. She is the author of the novel, Ocotillo Dreams (ASU Bilingual Press 2011), for which she received the Mariposa Award for Best First Book at the 2012 International Latino Book Awards and a 2012 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature. Her first full-length poetry collection, How Fire Is a Story, Waiting, (Tia Chucha Press 2012) was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Award, the Patterson Prize, and received First Prize in Poetry at the 2013 ILBA. Her new poetry book, Bird Forgiveness, is forthcoming from 3: A Taos Press in 2018. She is the City of Santa Barbara’s 2023-2025 Laureate.

Photo Credit: Nell Campbell

Melinda Palacio is an award-winning poet and author from South-Central Los Angeles. She studied Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley and earned a graduate degree in the same field at UC Santa Cruz. She is a 2007 PEN USA Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellow and an alum of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. In 2009, Bilingual Press accepted her novel manuscript, Ocotillo Dreams, for publication. That same year, she won Kulupi Press' Sense of Place 2009 competition for her poetry chapbook, Folsom Lockdown. Tia Chucha Press published first full-length poetry manuscript, How Fire Is A Story, Waiting Fall 2012. The title poem from that collection has been widely reprinted and represents the first poem she published in 2006. The book was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize and placed first in the International Latino Book Awards. Her poetry and fiction have been widely published and anthologized, including Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, Southern Poetry Anthology IV: Louisiana, San Diego Poetry Annual N