Two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene is the author of four nonfiction books: There Is No Me Without You (2006), Praying for Sheetrock, The Temple Bombing, and Last Man Out.  The Atlanta-based writer and mother of seven is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine and Good Housekeeping, and has written for The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Readers Digest, Newsweek, Life, the Washington Post, Ms., Salon, The Wilson Quarterly, and Redbook. A popular speaker and lecturer, Greene has been a guest on CNN and on NPR, and her stories have been featured on Today, Good Morning America, Primetime, and 20/20.

In There Is No Me Without You, Greene continues her exploration of the world of Africa’s AIDS orphans she first visited in 2001, while reporting for The New York Times Magazine. By the time the author met Haregewoin Teferra, who would become the subject of There Is No Me Without You, Greene was able to approach her not only as a journalist, but as the adoptive mother of two Ethiopian children. Greene’s articles about Haregewoin in Good Housekeeping resulted in the latter’s being named a Hero of Health, earning prize money to enable her to continue her work among homeless children.

Illuminating incidents of racial and political injustice, Greene’s books have been acclaimed for their eloquence as well as for their moral acuity and are widely taught in American high schools and universities.  Praying for Sheetrock (1991), the story of the political awakening of the isolated African-American community of coastal McIntosh County and the downfall of the corrupt courthouse gang, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, a winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, and many other honors, and was named to NYU’s list of the top 100 works of journalism of the 20th century. The Temple Bombing (1996) is about the attack on an Atlanta synagogue in October 1958, part of the violent white resistance to desegregation. It, too, was also a National Book Award finalist, a New York Times Notable Book, and winner of half-a-dozen awards. Last Man Out (2003), the story of the 1958 coal mine disaster in Springhill, Nova Scotia, also was a New York Times Notable Book and was named one of the best books of the year by half-a-dozen periodicals.

Greene is married to Donald F. Samuel, a noted criminal defense attorney in Atlanta. They have seven children ranging from 24 to 10, four by birth and three by adoption. Of the youngest, one arrived from Bulgaria and two from Ethiopia, and the family is in the process of adopting two more Ethiopian orphans from the foster home of Haregewoin Teferra.

For an archive of Melissa Fay Greene’s articles, and for her interviews on radio and in print, please visit www.melissafaygreene.com