Melanie Carter is a senior instructor in the Department of Rhetoric and Composition.She holds a BSc in journalism from the University of Florida, an MA in English from the University of South Carolina, and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Alabama. She joined AUC in 2004, bringing skills from an initial career in newspaper journalism as well as a range of teaching experience that included work in East Los Angeles and at a school for the blind in Sendai, Japan.

Her poems have been published in The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, Antioch Review and Spoon River Poetry Review, among others. A number of poems have been Pushcart Prize nominees, and her manuscript, Water to Sky, was a finalist for several book prizes, including the Yale Series of Younger Poets award. 

Her research and writing interests center on the notions of perception, synesthesia, landscape and the ways natural environments affect creativity. Recent travel in Finland and the North and South Islands of New Zealand has resulted in several writing projects, including a theater performance piece, a poetry manuscript, and an illustrated book for adults. Her interest in religion and traditional knowledge systems has led her to study the teaching of meditation. She is currently working on courses that present contemplative practices as ways of exploring writing as well as the performing and visual arts.