Melany Neilson (born December 1, 1958, in
Moses Lake, Washington
Moses Lake is a city in Grant County, Washington, United States. The population was 25,146 as of the 2020 census. Moses Lake is the largest city in Grant County. The city anchors the Moses Lake Micropolitan area, which includes all of Grant Co ...
) is an American author.
Biography
Neilson grew up in
Lexington, Mississippi, and attended the segregated
Central Holmes Academy. Nelson later graduated from the
University of Mississippi
The University of Mississippi (byname Ole Miss) is a public research university that is located adjacent to Oxford, Mississippi, and has a medical center in Jackson. It is Mississippi's oldest public university and its largest by enrollment.
...
with a degree in English in 1979, and a master's degree in journalism in 1986.
Her first book, ''Even Mississippi'', a memoir of
Southern
Southern may refer to:
Businesses
* China Southern Airlines, airline based in Guangzhou, China
* Southern Airways, defunct US airline
* Southern Air, air cargo transportation company based in Norwalk, Connecticut, US
* Southern Airways Express, M ...
politics, was published in 1989, and received the
Lillian Smith Award, the Mississippi Authors Award, the Gustavas Myers Outstanding Book on Human Rights, and a nomination for the
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize () is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition within the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made h ...
. Neilson chronicled her work with Robert Clark, the Democratic Party nominee for U.S. Congress in 1982 and 1984, and her own "evolution as a white among blacks, seeking a new Mississippi."
The book chronicles Neilson's family history
and its connection to old Mississippi politics, specifically "the emotional trials of a young white woman from an old Delta family who violates deeply-rooted race, caste, class and gender taboos by going to work for a black politician." Hailed as "one of the most intriguing of ... conversion narratives – and by one of the youngest of Southern converts who have written books on the subject," ''Even Mississippi'' has become a first-person narrative source for books exploring race, politics and the South.
Her first novel, ''The Persia Café'', was published in 2001 to wide praise. The story of a race murder set in a small Mississippi River town in 1962, the novel explored themes of identity, friendship, family, race and American history with "evocative detail and a powerful sense of place." Neilson revisits many of the themes and settings of "a time when the old Southern order was on the verge of changing, when blacks were beginning to claim the rights and opportunities so long denied them and when too many whites were violently resisting them and any other whites – there certainly weren't many – who appeared sympathetic to the black cause."
Neilson was criticized by some for "giving the FBI a positive role that in fact it only rarely filled in the deep South during the most difficult years of the 1960s."
Most reviewers, however, focused on "the death throes of the Jim Crow South" and Neilson's ability to capture "the feel of a culture at a particular time and the ineffable moment a heart changes."
A month after the book's publication, publisher
HarperCollins
HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Cor ...
identified eight separate sentences similar to passages
in
Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver (born April 8, 1955) is an American novelist, essayist and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology at DePauw University and the Univers ...
's 1988 novel ''The Bean Trees''. Neilson immediately changed the eight sentences and her publisher,
St. Martin's, printed those changes in future editions. According to St. Martin's, Neilson apologized in a letter to Kingsolver for "the unintentional inclusion of the language in question," and offered to apologize in person.
Neilson is married to
Frederick G. Slabach, President of
Texas Wesleyan University
Texas Wesleyan University is a private Methodist university in Fort Worth, Texas. It was founded in 1890 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. The main campus is located in the Polytechnic Heights neighborhood of Fort Worth. Its mascot is th ...
in
Fort Worth, Texas
Fort Worth is the fifth-largest city in the U.S. state of Texas and the 13th-largest city in the United States. It is the county seat of Tarrant County, covering nearly into four other counties: Denton, Johnson, Parker, and Wise. According ...
and Former chief executive officer of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation.
They have two sons, Nicholas and Noel, and one daughter, Amelia.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Neilson, Melany
1958 births
Living people
21st-century American novelists
21st-century American women writers
American women novelists
Novelists from Washington (state)
People from Moses Lake, Washington
University of Mississippi alumni