Malissa Kent

Malissa grew up listening to and telling stories. Heavily influenced by her native Pacific Northwest, her love of the Middle Ages, and her time spent living in France, her work spans from Fantasy and Steampunk to literary fiction and creative nonfiction.

Her first major publication was “The Heart Is the Matter,” one of three original pieces in Ann VanderMeer’s 2012 Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution anthology, published by Tachyon Press. She’s currently shopping her epic Fantasy novel, Lark’s Flight, which was a finalist in the 2015 Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Contest.

She earned an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine; while there she studied with award-winning and best-selling authors David Anthony Durham, Elizabeth Hand, James Patrick Kelly, and Nancy Holder.

She also attended the Denver Publishing Institute, received an Editing certificate from the University of Washington, and holds a double-major in Creative Writing and French from Knox College. Way back in 2000 and 2001, she received two gold awards for genre short stories in the national Scholastic Writing Awards.

Malissa spends as much time as possible in France, a country she fell in love with while participating in the People to People Student Ambassador program in 1998 and 2000. In 2001 she spent her junior year of high school in France as an AFS exchange student, and subsequently returned to live in different regions twice more.

Thanks to her fluency in French, she was hired as one of the founding members of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing copyright review team, later moving on to a merchandising position in the Books department. She now writes internal communications for a very different international corporation.

She lives in Seattle with her husband and a wonderfully precarious pile of yet-to-be-read books.