Melissa Hintz, a Shaker Heights resident, escaped from corporate America to become a writer, her left brain exhausted from years as a number-crunching actuary and her right brain impatient to let her imagination run wild again. Her first book, On Chagrin Boulevard; A Collection of Fluff, Fables, Fabrications, Flapdoodle, Free Verse and Flash Fiction, includes flash fiction and poetry that explore universal themes of love, desire, loss, and joy. She is currently doing a final edit on her third novel. All three of her novels have been semi-finalists in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing contest. Although all three are currently unpublished, she is tenacious and vows to see them in print.

She loves the complexity inherent in the creation of characters and plot twists for her novels, as well as the challenge of poetry, which requires condensing a story, idea, or emotion into just a few words. Both indulge her fascination with the nuances of sounds, magic of words, and joy of unexpected discovery.

Pre-COVID, she read regularly at open-mics at Loganberry Books, presented at the Cuyahoga County Library, created ekphrastic poetry for a Heights Arts exhibit, among other engagements, and was treasurer for three years of The Lit (Cleveland’s longest running literary organization). She has honed her craft by taking various writing classes and workshops, including Tinker Mountain Writers’ Workshop, Write to the Finish, The Lit, Wildacres, and Writing the Breakout Novel, as well as Case Western’s Siegal Lifelong Learning poetry and nonfiction workshops.

When not writing, she loves travel, nature, good conversation, good books, music, and exploring bookstores, restaurants, museums, theaters, and parks. She treasures her friends and family and her four writing groups.

She grew up and went to school in Madison, Wisconsin (BS Math) and then lived and worked for twenty years in New York before returning to the Midwest where she lives with her husband Jim.

Melissa treasures the rich literary environment provided by Cleveland’s many libraries, book stores, fervent readers and talented writers, and Heights Arts