Melissa Sites, Neighbor

I came to College Park in 1990 to attend graduate school at the University of Maryland, after graduating from Hollins College in Roanoke, VA, with a BA in Music and English.

I studied Creative Writing, Poetry, and then went on to study English Lit and Women's Studies.  My dissertation, Mary Shelley and Utopian Domesticity, examines Shelley's novels as a part of the radical tradition of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, father William Godwin, and husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

I now divide my time between  College Park Arts Exchange and performing and teaching music  (singing, piano, and guitar). Ask me about the unaccompanied Appalachian ballad tradition!

My husband, Ian Blackwell Rogers, is an actor working with various DC area stage companies.  We live in Greenbelt, where I'm active with the PTA, and we have one son, who likes to write, draw, sing and dance.