King, Melissa 1967(?)–

PERSONAL: Born c. 1967, in AR; children: Jackson. Hobbies and other interests: Basketball.

ADDRESSES: Home—Fayetteville, AR. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Houghton Mifflin, 215 Park Ave. S., New York, NY 10003.

CAREER: Writer; formerly affiliated with natural foods company, Chicago, IL.

WRITINGS:

She's Got Next: A Story of Getting in, Staying open, and Taking a Shot (memoir), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2005.

Contributor to Sports Illustrated, Chicago Reader, Sport Literate, and Arkansas Times. Contributor to The Best American Sports Writing 1999, edited by Richard Ford, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1999.

SIDELIGHTS: In She's Got Next: A Story of Getting in, Staying open, and Taking a Shot, Melissa King traces the way that basketball shaped her life. She first learned the game while living in her native Arkansas, but it was when she moved to Chicago at age twenty-seven that basketball became an integral part of her existence. Bored, lonely, and unhappy with her job, King joined an organized amateur league, but she soon found more satisfaction playing in pickup games throughout the city. King writes about how basketball helped her to get through, noted a Publishers Weekly contributor, "but she's equally engaged by the character and psychology of her fellow players." She's Got Next mixes vignettes of these other athletes with King's reflections on life and her chosen game. The result is "a pleasant, conversational book—part sports memoir, part chick lit, and part amateur philosophy," Whitney Pastorek commented in Entertainment Weekly. Despite the book's wide range, King's "poetic prose, as rhythmic as a dribble, will carry readers wherever she goes," concluded a Kirkus Reviews critic.

She's Got Next is nominally a memoir, but, as King explained in an interview on the Houghton Mifflin Web site, "one does have to remember, with writing like this, that the writer is choosing what to write about, and she's working from memory…. What we remember and what stands out at the end of the day is that small thing that happened and made us feel something, and feelings aren't journalism."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

King, Melissa, She's Got Next: A Story of Getting in, Staying open, and Taking a Shot, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2005.

PERIODICALS

Entertainment Weekly, June 10, 2005, Whitney Pastorek, "She Hoops to Conquer," p. 113.

Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2005, review of She's Got Next, p. 402.

Publishers Weekly, May 2, 2005, review of She's Got Next, p. 189.

ONLINE

Houghton Mifflin Web site, http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/ (September 23, 2005), "A Conversation with Melissa King."

Melissa King Home Page, http://www.melissaking.net (September 23, 2005).