Melvin Sterne grew up in Georgia and West Texas. He worked in union construction for 24 years, primarily with the boilermakers’ union but also with the ironworkers’ and pipe- fitters’ unions, before becoming a serious university student. He earned his BA (Magna Cum Laude) from the University of Washington, his MA from the University of California at Davis, and his PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University.
He has published twenty short stories in national and international magazines, winning several awards for his fiction. He has taught at the American University of Afghanistan, the American University of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and currently directs the Passport to Excellence Program at the S P Jain School of Global Management in Singapore.
The novel, Zara, came from a story he heard from a victim of human trafficking he met while traveling in India. Though the novel is fiction, most of the biographical details of Zara’s life are true.
