Melissa Alipalo is a poet, teacher, and international development consultant now based in Maine. She is a minister’s daughter and grew up in the Midwest. In 1999, after working three years at a newspaper and earning multiple awards, she left for the Philippines as a graduate student and freelance foreign correspondent.

She is married to a Filipino journalist, and they raised two children in Manila. Her career has taken her to more than 15 countries. Her poetry and writing draw on that experience.

She holds an MSc in Social Development from Ateneo de Manila University and an MFA from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine, where she was editor of The Stonecoast Review.

She continues to work in Asia on climate change and urban development and teaches writing at Southern Maine Community College.

Her poetry manuscript, The Past is 13 Hours Ahead, is a collection that traces her family's encounter with Duterte’s militarized police, the Philippine drug war and its aftermath, alongside the everyday negotiations of identity in the United States. The manuscript exists as a chapbook and as an in-progress full-length collection. The chapbook is currently under submission.

Selected Poetry Publication Credits

• Black Horse Review — “Trees, Keep Counting” (published as “The Modus Vivendi of Rodrigo Duterte”)

• Beyond Words Magazine — “Reading Rilke After Arrival” (print only publication)

• Holy Gossip — “The Rhetorics of Emphasis”

• New Verse News — “A Presidential Cento Pantoum by Rodrigo Duterte”

• The Bombay Literary Magazine — “Dredging”, alongside “You are Witness, Not Martyr” and “Desert Ghazal.”

• Stonecoast Review— “Universalist Bells” and interview.