A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Melissa Flashman majored in English at Wesleyan University. After stints in the English Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins, commercial and indie radio, the advertising world and something called cool-hunting (it was the late ‘90s), she got her first job in publishing working as an assistant in the literary department of ICM before moving to Trident Media Group where she was a literary agent for over ten years before joining Janklow & Nesbit Associates in 2017.
Melissa represents award-winning and best-selling fiction and nonfiction. In nonfiction, she is particularly interested in conversation-changing books including journalism, science, technology, business/finance/economics, memoir/narrative, essays and cultural criticism. She is drawn to a range of literary and commercial fiction and is particularly excited about stories that touch on the deeper meaning of life, family, identity and love. A good page-turner is always welcome.
Melissa’s authors have won numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize, the Windham Campbell Prize, Whiting Award, National Book Critic Circle Award, the Rona Jaffe Award, the Hugo Award, n + 1 writer’s fellowship, and The Nation’s Ridenhour Prize among others. A former first serial and magazine agent, she enjoys helping her writers place journalism, essays and fiction in a range of publications including The New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times, Vogue, The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, the Paris Review, n + 1, Tin House, the Baffler and Jacobin.
Recent titles include The Dawn of Everything (FSG) by David Graeber & David Wengrow; Out of Office (Knopf) by Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen; Stray (Knopf) by Stephanie Danler; The Undying (FSG) by Anne Boyer; From the Hood to the Holler (Crown) by Charles Booker; Indelicacy (FSG) by Amina Cain; Perfect Tunes (Avid Reader) by Emily Gould; Election Meltdown (Yale UP) by Richard L. Hasen; Golden Gates (Penguin Press) by Conor Dougherty; Unwinding Anxiety (Avery) by Judson Brewer; Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone (Metropolitan) by Astra Taylor.
She lives in Brooklyn; find her on Twitter @melflashman.