Meet StS Assistant Editor

Assistant Editor, Melanie Tague grew up in rural Missouri and graduated with her BA in History and Sociology from the University of Missouri in 2012. Currently, she is a poet in her 2nd year in the MFA program at George Mason University. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in journals such as burntdistrict, Rappahannock Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Newpages. In a nut shell, feminism is important to Melanie because she believes in the equality of every single human voice regardless of gender, sexual orientation, religion, race, or class.

At the moment, Melanie is most interested in the oppression of the prison population and how the literary world and this journal can do more to reach out to those in prison and work toward helping reforms happen within both the justice and prison systems.

Melanie’s Recommendations

Lullaby with Exit Sign

Tague Writes: Hadara Bar-Nadav’s collection Lullaby (With Exit Sign) is a powerful collection in which the speaker grapples with the loss of her father. The speaker speaks help healing from an unexpected voice, that of Emily Dickinson. Nadav quietly inserts quotes from Dickinson’s work in order to help her address her grief head on and eventually move past it.

A New Language for Falling out of Love

Tague Writes: In her debut collection, A New Language for Falling Out of Love, Meghan Privitello asks the reader to travel along with the speaker on a journey of “what ifs.” Privitello shows us there are things to be learned from meditating on the hypothetical and by allowing the hypothetical to seep into the real.