Melissa Holbrook Pierson

Pierson was born in Akron, Ohio. She attended Vassar College, receiving her BA in English Literature in 1980. Her MA, also in English Literature, was awarded in 1984 by Columbia University. She is a lifelong motorcycle enthusiast and this is reflected in many of her books. Her works are often explorations of personal experience, extended into general social commentary and history. She is a longtime book, film, and photography critic, and reviewed film on video for Entertainment Weekly, 1990 - 1999.

When asked in an interview, "Do you consider yourself a travel writer, a kind of 'place writer', a nature writer, or—" Pierson answered, "All of those things. I don't think of myself as fitting into a category. But I had to be careful in all of my books not to repeat things, because I have these ideas, and though the subjects were disparate, the same idea would come up through different portals."[2]

The Place You Love is Gone was described by Anthony Swofford in The New York Times Book Review as "the punk rock girl sitting in the rear pews at church, offering a counter narrative: what she says about the patriarchy and the raping of the land (and the Indians and dairy farmers and denizens of small towns in upstate New York) is true but the priests (elected politicians and water managers and ambitious city planners) wish her parents would drag the girl home; the organ player pipes louder in order to drown the punk's anti-establishment rant."[3]