In 1984, the same year the White Buffalo Café and Emporium closed its doors, three-year-old Melissa Fite Johnson moved to Pittsburg, KS. She never left. The town fostered in her a love of literature and writing. She earned a Master’s Degree in English Literature from Pittsburg State University and currently teaches English at her alma mater, Pittsburg High School.

Her poems have appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Broadsided Press, Midwest Quarterly, Red Paint Hill Journal, and elsewhere, and her first collection, While the Kettle’s On (Little Balkans Press,2015), won the Nelson Poetry Book Award and is a Kansas Notable Book. Melissa and her husband, Marc, live in Pittsburg with their four backyard chickens.