Meet Paige
Paige Melin, 2013 UB BA grad with a double major in English and French Language and Literature, accepts 2019 Buffalo Niagara 360 Spotlight Professional Award
In Spring 2013 Paige graduated summa cum laude from UB with a Bachelor of Arts degree, double majoring in English and French Language and Literature. From UB she went on to the University of Maine, earning a Master's of Arts degree (also summa cum laude) in English with concentrations in Gender and Literature, and Poetry and Poetics. She continued to utilize her French language skills in graduate school, receiving a Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship to study Québécois History and Literature at McGill University in 2015. Her M.A. thesis, mentored by poet and Professor Jennifer Moxley, was a translation into English of the French-Canadian novel, Querelle d’un squelette avec son double by Ying Chen.
Since July 2016 she has been Education Coordinator for Explore Buffalo, a non-profit organization providing tours and other opportunities to find out what makes Buffalo such a great place to live. In January 2019, Buffalo Niagara 360 honored Paige with a Spotlight Professional Award in recognition of her contributions to the Buffalo Niagara region as a "young rising leader."
Also a poet and writer, Paige has published a book of poetry, Puddles of an Open (BlazeVOX, 2016) and a chapbook, MTL/BFL//ÉTE/QUINZE (Buffalo Ochre Papers, 2016). She served as an Editorial Advisor for Ursa Literary Review, Paideuma: Modern & Contemporary Poetry & Poetics, the anthology My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry (BlazeVOX, 2017), and the upcoming Ghost City Press 2019 Summer Micro-Chap series. Her poems, reviews, and articles have appeared in Peach Mag, the Buffalo News, Step Out Buffalo, Chebacco: The Magazine of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society, Rain Taxi Review of Books, & others. She curates and hosts the 4th Friday Reading Series at Dog Ears Bookstore as well as the annual PoetExpo at the Burchfield Penney Art Center.
In the fall of 2018 Paige applied for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Senegal and the Teaching Assistant Program in France. After teaching abroad, Paige plans to get her Ph.D. in Translation Theory to teach & translate francophone literature not traditionally represented in the Western canon.
“I am so grateful for the supportive community I found in the Romance Languages Department at UB. Without these professors and mentors, I would never have had the courage to study abroad in France as an undergrad, or to pursue my current goal of teaching English abroad.”