Melissa Scott Sinclair is a journalist, fiction writer and essayist. She is the recipient of the 2023 Lit/South Award in Fiction and the 2021 Michael Kenneth Smith Novel Fellowship. Melissa’s bylines have appeared in The Washington Post, Audubon, Richmond magazine, and other publications. Look for her piece about the ancestral dens of the timber rattlesnake in WILD LIFE, a book forthcoming from Atlas Obscura. She lives with her family in Chesterfield, Virginia