ABOUT

Melody Schreiber is a journalist based in the Washington, D.C., area.

She is focused on health, science, and the Arctic, and she has reported from every inhabitable continent.

She is the editor of What We Didn’t Expect: Personal Stories About Premature Birth, published by Melville House.

Melody’s newsletter, Not a Doctor, covers health, science, parenting and more through a personal and practical lens.

She is a regular contributor to the Guardian US and NPR, and a contributing editor for The New Republic.

Her articles, essays and reviews have also been published by The Washington Post, New York, Wired, The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, Outside, STAT News, Vice, Insider, The Toast, Catapult, USA Today, Washingtonian, Delaware State News and elsewhere.

She was the D.C. correspondent at ArcticToday for five years.

Biography

Melody has received several journalism fellowships.

In 2024, she was a food systems reporting fellow with the Johns Hopkins University.

She reported on health and gender in Rwanda in 2019 on a reporting fellowship with the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF). Her story on an unusual malaria monitoring program for Undark was selected as a Notable mention in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021.

As a journalism fellow with the GroundTruth Project in 2015-16, she reported first on the Paris climate agreement and then on the relationship between climate change and mental health in the Scandinavian and Canadian Arctic. Her story on suicide prevention in the Canadian Arctic for Pacific Standard was selected as a Notable mention in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2019.

She has spoken on CNN, C-SPAN Radio, and Feature Story News, and Working Mother wrote about her email signature and efforts to balance working parenthood.

Previously, Melody worked as a program manager and communications director at the International Reporting Project (IRP) for six years, and before that she was an assistant editor at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Before that, she worked at a tire shop, a telemarketing bank, a motorcycle shop, and food and retail businesses. (Sometimes simultaneously.)

She received her bachelor’s degree in English and linguistics from Georgetown University, and her master’s degree in writing from the Johns Hopkins University. As an alumna, she helped to teach science policy courses for Hopkins’ graduate science writing program in 2019 and 2020.