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Born along Long Island’s north shore in 1971, Peter Charles Melman moved with his family to Louisiana at the age of twelve, where he learned to hunt woodcock, skin catfish, dip tobacco, and in so doing, thoroughly offend the more nebbish-y tendencies of his cousins back up in New York. After receiving a B.A. in History from Tufts University in 1993, he left Boston for Podebrady, Czech Republic. There, in a modest castle overlooking the toxic yet stubbornly noble Elbe River, he taught English to university students who understood better than he the meaning of endurance through art. Two years later, he moved to Manhattan to gain weight as an ersatz restaurant critic and editorial assistant at the Zagat Restaurant Survey. Shiftless, without goal or ambition, he returned to Louisiana in 1996 to begin working at Barnes & Noble-Lafayette, at which he was immediately placed on probation, a result of his poor shelving skills. Deciding then that he would rather write books than alphabetize them, he entered the Creative Writing program at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette the following August. Four-and-a-half years later, after publishing in over a dozen literary and scholarly journals, he earned his doctorate in English-Creative Writing with academic distinction, the first candidate in two-and-a-half years to do so. He was duly impressed with himself.
Following graduation and after a brief stint in Seattle where he worked at the Elliott Bay Book Company, a cathedral of a bookstore from which he was again nearly fired, he returned to New York in 2002. In Brooklyn, he found employment at the small but beloved BookCourt, a bookstore from which he was, at long last, fired. This time for researching Landsman at the expense of every other professional duty, while on the company dime. It was an amicable parting of the ways, however, and the owners have graciously invited Melman to give a reading whenever he wants – providing he shelves his own books thereafter.
Melman met his wife, Elena, in an appropriately literary bar nearby, courted her in the way that most broke, unpublished writers do – with booze and promises – and is now grateful for the companionship she allows them to share. For health insurance, a steady paycheck, and the privilege of instructing some of the finest young minds America has to offer, he currently teaches English at Hunter College High School. Melman merely knows his students as brains with legs. He and Elena live happily in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
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