A writer and historian, Melissa Walker teaches as an associate professor of history at Converse College. She writes extensively on twentieth century Southern history. In 2005, she collaborated with Hub City on South of Main, for which some of her students conducted research as a class project. She also wrote the introduction to When the Soldiers Came to Town.

Walker completed undergraduate work at Maryville College in Tennessee, and she earned a Ph.D. in history at Clark University in Massachusetts. Her first book, All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) received the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians.  Her most recent book, Southern Farmers and Their Stories (University Press of Kentucky, 2006), examines the impact of twentieth century and economic changes on rural Southerners. 

Currently, she is Chairman of the Hub City Writers Project Board of Directors. She and her husband live in Spartanburg where they garden, ride bikes, and read in their spare time.