Melody Sumner Carnahan

Melody Sumner Carnahan

Melody Sumner Carnahan’s work was described in 1999 in the Village Voice as “The most musical prose since Gertrude Stein.” Charles Shere (The Tribune) wrote “There have been few precedents to this kind of sustained avant-garde literature with a moving human content.” Carnahan is author of three story collections from Burning Books, The Time Is Now (1985), Thirteen (1995), and One Inch Equals Twenty-Five Miles (2001), as well as the biography of a Tibetan nobleman, In the Presence of My Enemies (Clear Light Publishers, 1995). Her stories have appeared in over thirty-five publications, including the City Lights Review and THE Magazine. Carnahan received an M.F.A. in creative writing from Mills College, working at the Center for Contemporary Music, then directed by Robert Ashley, where she began collaborating with composers, artists, and musicians, providing texts for Laetitia Sonami’s performances and others. For seventeen years her stories and texts have been used in compositions, performances, audioworks, film and video soundracks, installations, and have been broadcast internationally. She has received support and commissions from New York’s Experimental Inter-media Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, New American Radio, CBC in Canada, NTT/ICC in Tokyo, and recently from ABC in Sydney, Australia, where she was the Creative Media Arts Fellow for 2000. Carnahan’s audio CD The Time Is Now (Burning Books/Frog Peak, 1998) presents her writing recorded by fourteen composers and performers. It received a 1999 Independent Publishers Award for audiofiction. Other collaborations have been recorded on Nonesuch, Tellus, 4-Tay Records, Boner Girl Prods, Mode, and Lovely.