Melissa Balmain is a writer, teacher, and recovering mime. She edits Light, America's longest-running journal of light verse. Her full-length poetry collection, Walking in on People, was chosen by X.J. Kennedy for the Able Muse Book Award. Her new, shorter collection is The Witch Demands a Retraction: Fairy-Tale Reboots for Adults, illustrated by Ron Barrett (Humorist Books). Balmain's poems and prose have appeared in such places as the American Bystander, American Life in Poetry, the Hopkins Review, McSweeney's, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Poetry Daily, Rattle, and the Washington Post. Poet Laureate Billy Collins has described her work as "an infectious, often hilarious blend of the sweet and the lethal, the charming and the acidic." Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Weingarten has called it "extremely irresponsible."