Melissa Balmain's poetry collection, Walking in on People (Able Muse Press, 2014), was chosen by X.J. Kennedy as the winner of the 2013 Able Muse Book Award. She edits Light, the country's oldest journal of light verse, which she helped revive and bring online at www.lightpoetrymagazine.com. As a journalist and humorist, she has traveled widely and written on subjects ranging from popular culture to parenthood, from cattle ranchers to collies that surf. Her memoir, Just Us: Adventures and Travels of a Mother and Daughter (Faber and Faber, 1998), is about the days when she was free to run off with her mother and mush sled dogs or hike with llamas--also known as the days before she and her husband became parents of two.Balmain's poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in several anthologies, and in such publications as American Arts Quarterly, Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry Daily, The Spectator, The Washington Post, and Success, where she is a columnist. She has won national journalism honors and been a finalist for the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and the X.J. Kennedy Parody Award. She teaches writing at the University of Rochester and lives nearby with her husband, their children, and two non-surfing cats.