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Author, Melanie Mitzner

As a child, nightfall to Melanie Mitzner meant reading in bed by flashlight. “As soon as I could walk unsupervised my parents sent me to the library. Of course I wanted to go buy candy instead but they were determined to get us kids to read more,” she recalled.

Mitzner was born into a large family of seven in Atlanta, Georgia. Both of her parents who originally hailed from New York were very creative. “My mother was an artist and children’s fashion designer and my father had a beautiful tenor voice, but unfortunately because his father died at a young age, he couldn’t accept the scholarship he was offered at Julliard, forfeiting it by working to support his mother and brothers, becoming a rabbi and eventually earning his Ph.D. to become a professor of social sciences,” she recollected.

In high school, Mitzner began writing poetry, short stories and plays. “I love using my imagination and transforming personal experience, research and observations into a world that never existed before,” she explained. Mitzner went on to college and received a B.A., cum laude, in French Drama, from the University of Georgia. She studied screenwriting at NYU, the New School and privately with screenwriter Meade Roberts, who adapted Tennessee Williams’ plays Summer and Smoke and The Fugitive Kind for the screen. In 1994, after living in New York City for 16 years, she relocated to Greenport.

Mitzner has written nearly a dozen novels and plays, most recently Impala Suicide, a political satire.

She wrote a novel entitled, “I” about a triangle between an intersexual, the surgeon who reassigned h/er and his therapist wife with whom s/he falls in love. Her novel Slow Reveal was a finalist in the Heekin Foundation Fellowships in 2000. In 1996 her play Personal Effects received a fellowship from the M.E.T. Theater in New York and a staged reading was produced at Vail Leavitt Theater in Riverhead.

Her short fiction has been published in quarterlies, zines and anthologies. As a journalist, she has written articles for The Wine Spectator, Hampton Country, Backstage, Hollywood Reporter, Broadcast Week and Millimeter among other publications. She received an Edward Albee Fellowship for her screenplay Zero Gravity and was a finalist in the Writers Guild East Foundation Fellowships for her screenplay Dodge and Burn. In the 1990s two of her screenplays, In The Name of Love and Out to Lunch were finalists in the Houston Film Festival Screenwriting competition.

Mitzner derives inspiration from visual, written and dramatic arts. “When I read a good book I'm always motivated. The power of good writing……is amazing to me.” She has been influenced by Philip Roth, Lorrie Moore, Martin Amis, Nabokov, Meg Wolitzer, David Leavitt, Toni Morrison, and artists like Mark Rothko and de Kooning. “In my 20s, I sent a manuscript to Toni Morrison at Random House where she was an editor. She replied with an encouraging letter but was extremely candid about what it takes to craft a good novel. It made me realize how much work I had ahead of me,” she conceded.

“When I complete a novel, I always want to do an adaptation for the screen. To me, mining the two mediums with the same subject matter is a thrilling proposition!”

Mitzner can be reached at melanieATthegroovymind.com