About Melinda
Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1944, Melinda Worth Popham earned a BA from the University of Chicago and MAs from Stanford University and Yale Divinity School. Her first novel, A Blank Book, is mercifully out of print: “Sales were brisk among my family.” Her novel Skywater was named an American Library Association Notable Book and won the Edward Abbey Award for EcoFiction. Her memoir Grace Period: My Ordination to the Ordinary was a Next Generation Indie Award finalist and had a starred review in Publishers Weekly, saying: “In this impeccably written memoir, Popham…proves herself a highbrow, refined spiritual sister to Anne Lamott.” After fifty-odd years in Southern California, writing, teaching writing, and raising a family, she returned to her hometown in 2019 to write her Kansas City, true-crime memoir Sweetness & Light.
“Memoirs…are at least implicitly about the invention of the self, how we stitch together a cohesive, if fluid, identity from a jumble of experiences and influences and, yes, imperfect memories.“
~ Gregory Cowles
“Memory sews together events that hadn’t previously met. It reshuffles the past and makes us aware that it is doing so.“
~ Etel Adnan
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