Melissa Pritchard is a Flannery O'Connor, Janet Heidinger Kafka, and Carl Sandburg Award-winning author. She has also been an embedded journalist in Afghanistan, where she befriended Ashton Goodman, a young soldier she memorialized for O, The Oprah Magazine, and authored a biography of Virginia Galvin Piper that US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor called "a delight to read." Founder of the Ashton Goodman Grant and the Afghan Women's Writing Project, she teaches at Arizona State University.