Winner of several awards for her poetry, including the Montana Art Council's 2010 Artist's Innovation Award, Melissa Kwasny also is one of two Montana Poets Laureate for 2019–21, an honor she shares with Mandy Smoker Broaddus.

The author of Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today (2017), Pictograph: Poems, (2015), and other acclaimed poetry collections, Melissa traveled the world to research her book, Putting on the Dog: The Animal Origins of What We Wear, a nonfiction examination of the complex question of what should we wear. In a world where it is impossible to be ethically pure, Melissa shows the better choices are not obvious. Melissa has taught poetry writing in graduate and undergraduate programs and in the public schools for over thirty years

Melissa lives in Basin, Montana. This community, known as an artist's retreat and destination for health-minded people looking for a cure at the area radon mines, lies about 10 miles southeast of the Continental Divide in a high narrow canyon in the Elkhorn Mountains along Interstate 15 about halfway between Butte and Helena.

Melissa has been a member-owner since May 2019.