Everybody Needs Something with Melanie Pappadis Faranello

Melanie Pappadis Faranello, award-winning writer and author of the story collection, Everybody Needs
Something (Donald L Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence/CSU Press, 2026) will share a presentation on Poetry on the Streets, her community engagement project that brings everyday people’s stories and words into public spaces to create social impact. Discussing the power of stories to connect us, there will also be an opportunity to add your own words to a community poem as part of a public art installation. The presentation will be followed by a short reading from Everybody Needs Something and a book signing.

This event is free and open to the public. It will be in the Auditorium of Decatur Library, on the Ground Floor. Due to new security protocols, guests must enter the building through the upper level, rear doors, and then take the elevator to "G." Elevators open at 6:30. Please arrive early to ensure extra time for security.

About the Book:

Melanie Faranello’s debut collection, Everybody Needs Something, delves into the interior lives of characters longing for connection, revealing the deep human desire to reach one another. A poignant exploration of the complexities of love, loss, and what is often left unsaid, the stories center on the space between us—couples, families, aging parents, children, and evolving selves that are shaped over time. A newly widowed construction worker travels to a debris-filled healing pool to ease his grief; a retired couple relocates across the globe hoping to escape their troubles only to discover a new problematic infestation; a father places an ad inviting strangers to his first solo Thanksgiving dinner; a couple on the brink endures a wildlife lecture at the elementary school between hospital visiting hours for their daughter; a young divorcee has an unexpected encounter with her long-dead father during a Latin Ballroom dance class. Quietly powerful and carefully observed, these fourteen stories resonate with emotional landscapes and hidden heartbreaks as characters meet their breaking points before somehow finding the courage to keep going.

About the Author:

Melanie Pappadis Faranello is the award-winning author of the story collection Everybody Needs Something (CSU Press, 2026), which received the 2025 Donald L Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. Her fiction and essays have appeared in various publications such as Swamp Pink, Electric Literature, Hippocampus, StoryQuarterly, Vol 1. Brooklyn, HuffPost Personal, and elsewhere. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she holds her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. She won Key West Literary Seminars’ 2022 Emerging Writers Award for Novel-in-Progress and was a 2024 Writer-in-Residence at Monson Arts. Originally from Chicago, she lives outside Hartford, CT, where she is the founder of Poetry on the Streets and Sonder Reading Series. Read more of her work at www.melaniefaranello.com.