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Melissa Fay Greene(born December 30, 1952, in Macon, Georgia) is an American journalist and author. A 1975 graduate of Oberlin College, Greene is the author of four books of nonfiction.

Praying for Sheetrock (1991), the true story of the often-criminal heyday of the good old boys in McIntosh County, Georgia on the rural coast of Georgia and the rise of civil rights there, won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Quality Paperback Book Club New Visions Award, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the 100 best works of American journalism of the 20th century by the journalism faculty of New York University.[1] and one of "The New Classics: Entertainment Weekly's Best 100 Books of the Last 25 Years"

The Temple Bombing(1996)investigates an incident of domestic terrorism during the era of “massive resistance" to desegregation in Atlanta in the 1950s with an attack on a Jewish synagogue called The Temple. The book was a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, the Georgia Author of the Year Award of the Georgia Writers Association, the Georgia Historical Society Award, [2] the Hadassah Myrtle Wreath Award, and the American Civil Liberties Union National Civil Liberties Award.

Last Man Out (2002), the story of the 1958 Springhill mining disaster in Springhill, Nova Scotia was named a best book of the year by the Chicago Tribune, the Globe and Mail, the Cox newspaper chain, and the New York Public Library.

There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Save Her Country’s Children (2006) [3] illuminates the Ethiopian orphan crisis caused by the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa through the portrait of a middle-aged Ethiopian foster mother and the dozens of children crossing her threshold. Winner of Elle Magazine’s Elle’s Lettres Readers Prize, a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, a Notable Book for the American Library Association and for Booksense, and named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, Christian Science Monitor, Entertainment Weekly, Chicago Tribune, and The Atlanta Constitution. There Is No Me Without You has been translated into 15 languages.

No Biking in the House without a Helmet is Greene's current work-in-progress: a light family memoir, it will be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in May 2011.

Greene has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Life Magazine, Good Housekeeping, The Atlantic, Readers Digest, The Wilson Quarterly, Redbook, and Salon.com. She was a 2010 recipient of an honorary doctorate from Emory University,

Melissa lives in Atlanta with her husband, Don Samuel, a criminal defense attorney and partner in the firm Garland, Samuel & Loeb. Married in 1979, they are the parents of nine children: Molly, 28, Seth, 25, Lee, 22, Lily, 18, Fisseha ("Sol"), 16, Daniel, 16, Jesse, 15, Helen, 14, and Yosef, 13. Jesse was adopted from Bulgaria in 1999; Helen, Fisseha, and brothers Daniel and Yosef were adopted from Ethiopia in 2002, 2004, and 2007. (Daniel and Yosef's photographs, from years prior to their adoption, and before the author knew they were to become her sons, appear in THERE IS NO ME WITHOUT YOU.) Molly Samuel, who graduated from Oberlin College in 2004 with a B.A. in Ancient Greek, lives in San Francisco, where she freelances for NPR-affiliate stations KQED and KALW as a producer, reporter, and arts critic; Molly was named a 2009-2010 Middlebury Environmental Journalism Fellow and is producing a radio series on California's Islands. Seth Samuel, who graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory in 2007 with a Bachelors in Music, and in 2009 from NYU with a Masters in Scoring for Film & Multimedia, also lives in San Francisco; he is an audio engineer at KALW; his original recent music appears at SethGSamuel.com; he scores the popular online cooking show, Economy Bites. Lee Samuel is a senior at the Rafael Recanati International School of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzlia, Israel, studying global conflict and development. Lily Samuel, a 2010 recipient of a gold medal in photography from The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards is a freshman at Oberlin College. And the younger five children live at home, playing a lot of soccer and basketball, hosting many sleepover friends, and sometimes expressing disappointment with what their mother has made for dinner, particularly the meatloaf.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Melissa Fay Greene", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0