Melissa Batchelor Warnke

Melissa Batchelor Warnke is a journalist, poet, editor at The Morning News, and assistant interviews editor at The Rumpus. She just returned to the East Coast after finishing a year in Rwanda as a Fulbright fellow, and will spend the summer working her research into a series of narrative nonfiction pieces (NB: this is a euphemism for “transcribing 100 hours of interview tape”). The piece she is most invested in is about a Rwandan therapist who is immensely successful at working with women who have children born of genocide rape, and at helping those women to disclose their rapists’ identities to their children.

Prior to becoming a journalist, Melissa worked as an anti-genocide community organizer, a human-rights Africa grantmaker, and an assistant in the Google Creative Lab. She’s searching for the narrative thread.