Lois Ruskai Melina

Lois Ruskai Melina's latest book is The Grammar of Untold Stories (Shanti Arts LLC, 2020), a collection of sixteen essays. Raised as a city girl before Title IX provided many athletic opportunities for girls, Melina was an adult before she discovered her love of sports and the outdoors—camping, hiking, running, kayaking, skiing, and rowing. Her relationship to mountains and water and wildlife and the female body shape her worldview and inform her writing. She has been a journalist and an educator and an advocate for survivors of domestic violence. As an engaged citizen, she has worked on Get Out the Vote efforts since organizing for Sen. Frank Church in 1980. After working as a newspaper reporter, Melina founded Adopted Child, a subscription-based newsletter aimed at helping adoptive parents understand the ways infertility and adoption impact both parents and children. Her books Raising Adopted Children (HarperCollins, 1986, 1998), Making Sense of Adoption (HarperCollins, 1989), and The Open Adoption Experience (with Sharon Kaplan Roszia, HarperCollins, 1993) have sold more than 250,000 copies and been translated into three languages. More important, they helped change the way parents and adoption professionals understand the dynamics of families formed by adoption. Adopted Child is now part of Adoptive Families magazine. Melina drew on her interest as a swim team parent and triathlete by following nine elite women swimmers for eighteen months leading up to the 2000 Olympic Trials. She told their stories in the book By a Fraction of a Second (Sports Publications, Inc., 2000). She began taking nonfiction and poetry classes as a nonmatriculating student at the University of Idaho, but it wasn’t until retiring in 2015 that she began to focus full-time on the essays that became this collection. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Melina received a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Toledo and an M.A. in Journalism from The Ohio State University. She holds a PhD in Leadership Studies from Gonzaga University where her research focused on the way individuals create the changes sought by social movements through the actions they take in their own lives. She was the lead editor of the International Leadership Association’s anthology The Embodiment of Leadership. As an educator, she taught journalism at Ball State University, the University of Idaho, and Washington State University and taught leadership at Gonzaga University and Union Institute & University. Her work has appeared in literary, mass media, and academic publications. She is currently working on a novel set in Iceland, France, and the Pacific Northwest. Melina lives with her husband and their two dogs in Portland, Oregon. She has a grown son and daughter and two grandchildren.