About the Author
Melissa D. Burrage is the author of The Karl Muck Scandal: Classical Music and Xenophobia in World War I America. She has worked as an adjunct writing consultant with undergraduate and graduate students at Harvard University. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Music from Keene State College in New Hampshire, and a Master’s Degree in History from Harvard University, where her thesis--a biography of a Boston-based mining capitalist in the American West--won Harvard’s prestigious 2004 Outstanding Thesis Prize in the Field of Social Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of East Anglia in the UK, where her work focused on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, specifically World War I and the American home front, gaining great insight about the United States from a European perspective.
Burrage enjoys writing poetry, beginning this effort in earnest after her twenty-two-year-old son died in a tragic motorcycle accident in his final semester of college. Melissa takes great comfort writing about family in beloved New England settings. She is a member of the Westwood Poetry Group, the Marge Piercy Poetry Group, is a 2022 winner of the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest. Her work can be found in Persimmon Tree, Paterson Literary Review, Northern New England Review, Portrait of New England Literary Magazine, Libretto Magazine, Moonstone Press, Wood Cat Review, Poetica Review, Foyer Magazine, Syncopation Literary Journal, Sweety Cat Press, Dashboard Horus Travel Blog, Cephalopress Border and Belonging Anthology, New Hampshire’s Smoky Quartz Tenth Anniversary Literary Anthology, Duality Literary Anthology, Quillkeepers Press Anthology, Notable Works’ Voices of the Earth: The Future of Our Planet, Southern Arizona Press Anthology: The Poppy: A Symbol of Remembrance, Earth’s Daughters #97 Illusions, and Westwood Poetry Anthology.
The Karl Muck Scandal was a winner of the 2020 Independent Publishers Book Award (IPPY) for US History; BBC Music Magazine’s Best Classical Music Book Release of 2019; and Best Book Award Finalist in 2019 in History and Performing Arts categories. In 2018- 2019, the book received an American Musicological Society Subvention Award, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2020, Melissa received the Charles A. Hildebrandt Award for Excellence in Holocaust and Genocide Studies by the Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.