Melissa Kwasny is the author of the acclaimed poetry collections The Nine Senses, Reading Novalis in Montana, The Archival Birds, and Thistle, which won the Idaho Prize in 2006. She is also the author of Pictograph: Poems, published in 2015.

Kwasny is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America's 2009 Cecil Hemley Award, as well as the 2009 Alice Fay di Castognola Award for a work in progress, the Montana Art Council's 2010 Artist's Innovation Award, and residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. She has taught as Visiting Writer at both the undergraduate and graduate level, including at the University of Wyoming, Eastern Washington University/Inland Pacific Center for Writers, and as the Richard Hugo Visiting Poet at the University of Montana. Relevant to her teaching for Lesley University, which she has done since 1999, she was a poet in the schools in grades K-12 public schools, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area for nine years.

Kwasny was born in Indiana and earned an MFA from the University of Montana. She lives outside of Jefferson City, Montana, in the Elkhorn Mountains.