UNCW Welcomes Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction Melody Moezzi

The UNCW Department of Creative Writing welcomes Melody Moezzi as Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction for the 2017–2018 academic year. Moezzi is a writer, speaker, activist, attorney, and award-winning author whose latest book is the critically acclaimed memoir Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life. Her first book, War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims, earned her a Georgia Author of the Year Award and a Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Honorable Mention in 2007. Moezzi will teach graduate and undergraduate nonfiction workshops as well as a graduate forms of fiction class in the fall.

“Not only is Melody Moezzi a great teacher, writer and speaker, but she brings knowledge and expertise in just the areas our students are hungry for,” says department chair David Gessner.

Moezzi’s writing appears in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor, the Daily Beast, and Al Arabiya, among other outlets. She is a blogger for HuffPost, for which she recently wrote about being an Iranian-American Muslim and her experiences with Islamophobia, and has provided commentary on issues ranging from mental health to Iran to feminism for CNN, BBC, NPR, HLN, PBS, CSPAN, and elsewhere. Moezzi is a graduate of Wesleyan University (Philosophy), the Emory University School of Law (JD), and the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health (MPH). She currently lives in Raleigh but plans to divide her time between Raleigh and the coast this year.