At age seven, Melissa Frederick wrote and illustrated her first fantasy novel, a story of mysterious islands and mountains made of ice cream and a teenaged girl driving around the world in a blue, cigar-shaped Winnebago.  By age ten, after failing to finish several notebooks’ worth of fantasy-adventure novels, she decided she was all washed up as an author.  Since then, she has more or less gotten over her writer’s block and managed to complete a Master’s degree in creative writing at Iowa State University.  Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in journals such as the Crab Orchard Review, The Cream City Review, Kalliope, The Pedestal, and the short-story anthology Modern Magic: Tales of Fantasy and Horror.  She was a featured author in the 2003-2004 season of Writing Aloud, produced by the InterAct Theatre Company in Philadelphia, and in 2006 she was a participant in the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.  Currently, she teaches literature and creative writing at Rosemont College and is inching her way toward a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature at Temple University.  In the course of her studies, she has become intimately acquainted with Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, to the detriment of her sanity.