Melody Schreiber is a journalist based in the Washington, D.C., area with a special focus on health, science, and the Arctic. 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 a columnist 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, NPR, 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.

Her fiction has been published by District Lines, Magical: An Anthology, and Abundant Grace.

Melody reported on health and gender in Rwanda in 2019 on a reporting fellowship with the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF). Her story on malaria surveillance, for Undark Magazine, 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, Melody 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 mental health and climate change, with photographer Camilla Andersen for Pacific Standard, was selected as a Notable mention in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2019.

She has spoken on CNN, WYNC’s The Takeaway, and C-SPAN Radio and TV, among other TV and radio outlets. 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), and before that she was an assistant editor at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Before that, she worked at a tire shop, a telemarketing bank, a motorcycle shop, and food and retail businesses. (Mostly not at the same time.)

Melody 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.

Contact Me

If you have any ideas, comments, links, or suggestions, please feel free to email Melody at MelodyASchreiber@gmail.com or, for secure messages, melodyschreiber@proton.me. Follow her on Bluesky @melodyschreiber.com.