Melissa Benson

As a member of the Appalachian diaspora living in Central Kentucky, Melissa Benson feels a deep connection to her heritage. She was honored with the title of Kentucky Colonel for co-founding Camp Beacon, a summer camp dedicated to supporting LGBTQ+ youth in 2023. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Kentucky where her research focuses on "struggling" adolescent readers and their response with multimodal texts. She has written poetry since childhood but this is her first published work.