The Writer’s Center welcomes 1455 to celebrate the launch of 1455 first annual book contest winner Melanie Hatter. This event features a reading by the author followed by a Q&A with 1455 Executive Director Sean Murphy.
FREE & open to the public. RSVP below.
Melanie S. Hatter is the author of Malawi’s Sisters, which was selected by Edwidge Danticat as the winner of the inaugural Kimbilio National Fiction Prize and was published by Four Way Books in 2019. Her debut novel, The Color of My Soul, won the 2011 Washington Writers’ Publishing House Fiction Prize, and Let No One Weep for Me, Stories of Love and Loss was released in 2015. Find her online at melanieshatter.com / @melanie_hatter
Sean Murphy is the founder of the non-profit 1455 Literary Arts and directs the Center for Story at Shenandoah University. He is the author of four poetry collections—The Blackened Blues (2021), Rhapsodies in Blue (2023), Kinds of Blue (2024), and Red, White, and Blues (2026). The short fiction collection This Kind of Man published in 2024, and his memoir, Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone, won Memoir Magazine’s 2022 Memoir Prize. He has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize and twice for Best of the Net. Murphy also hosts the podcast and Substack Some Things Considered, where he interviews best-selling authors, acclaimed critics, and celebrated musicians. Find him at seanmurphy.net
About the Prize-Winning Book
Melanie S. Hatter’s All the Pain We Endure follows Raebelle “Rae” Johnson, a biracial massage therapist in Washington, D.C., whose ability to glimpse the pain carried by others forces her to confront wounds of her own. Haunted by a volatile relationship with her father and wary of intimacy, Rae finds herself drawn to Kai, a martial artist whose own troubled past challenges her assumptions about love, strength, and vulnerability. As family tensions, buried trauma, and generations of racial pain converge, Rae must decide whether the hurt she has inherited will continue to define her. At once a love story and an exploration of family, race, trauma, and healing, the novel asks what it takes to break cycles of pain—and to believe ourselves worthy of love.
Find our more at https://1455litarts.substack.com/s/1455-books
If you need an accommodation for this event, please contact us at access@writer.org. We will attempt to fulfill all requests, but advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility services.
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