Melissa Febos is the nationally bestselling author of four books, most recently, Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Her fifth book, The Dry Season, is forthcoming in 2025. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, LAMBDA Literary, The Black Mountain Institute, The British Library, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. She is a full professor at the University of Iowa. 

While in Paris, Febos will be working on The Waiting Room, a short novel that takes place over a single day in the life of a scholar who has studied philosophies of pain and also suffers from it. 

In response to the high number of outstanding candidates for the Library’s annual Visiting Fellowship program, the Selection Committee has created the Scholar of Note distinction to acknowledge particularly exceptional applicants. The distinction was founded in 2022.

The Scholar of Note program is made possible through the generous support of The de Groot Foundation.