Melinda Moustakis was born in Fairbanks, Alaska and raised in California. She received her MA from UC Davis and her PhD in English and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. Bear Down Bear North: Alaska Stories, her first book published by University of Georgia Press in 2011, won the Flannery O' Connor Award and the Maurice Prize and was a 5 Under 35 selection by the National Book Foundation. The book was also a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She was a Hodder Fellow at The Lewis Center of the Arts at Princeton University and received a 2014 National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship in Fiction. Her story "They Find the Drowned" won a 2013 PEN/ O. Henry Prize.