Melanie McCabe is a writer of poems, essays, memoir and most recently, fiction. She is a lifelong Virginian and was a high school English and creative writing teacher in Arlington for 22 years. 

Her debut novel, ROAD LONGER THAN MEMORY, will be published by Oceanview Publishing on June 2, 2026. 

Her latest book of poems, ALL THE SIGNS WERE THERE, won the Longleaf Poetry Prize and is now available.

Her memoir, HIS OTHER LIFE: SEARCHING FOR MY FATHER, HIS FIRST WIFE, AND TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, won the 2016 University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize and was published in the fall of 2017.

Previous books of poems include: THE NIGHT DIVERS (Terrapin Books), WHAT THE NEIGHBORS KNOW (FutureCycle Press) and HISTORY OF THE BODY (David Robert Books.)

Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Reader's Digest, Shenandoah, Cumberland River Review, Sweet, Forge Literary Magazine and elsewhere.

Books by Melanie McCabe

Road Longer Than Memory

by Melanie McCabe - Fiction, Literary Fiction, Mystery, Psychological Suspense

After a failed relationship and an unsettled teaching career, Sara Barlow returns to her childhood home in Arlington, Virginia, hoping for a fresh start. But when she applies for a job at her old high school, a chance glimpse into the gymnasium shakes her to the core --- she spots the man she suspects was involved in a classmate’s violent death a decade earlier. Haunted by the past, Sara confronts the memories she’s spent years trying to suppress: her sister Suzanne’s fatal car crash, her secret summer with the reckless Devlin Barrie and the anonymous 911 call she made after witnessing what she believes was a murder. As the construction of Interstate 66 physically fractures her community, Sara grapples with emotional fault lines of her own --- guilt, silence and buried truth.