Melissa Mack is a poet and author of The Next Crystal Text (Timeless, Infinite Light / Nightboat), the chapbook Includes All Strangers (Hooke Press), and poems that have appeared in anthologies such as The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets (Nomadic Press), journals such as the Berkeley Poetry Review, Hot Pink, The Capilano Review, Elderly, and other ephemera. A long-time resident of Oakland, California, Melissa helped organize community-based spaces of study at the intersection of art, politics, and education, such as the Oakland Summer School and the Bay Area Public School. She now lives in Santa Cruz, where she is a PhD student in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.