About Melissa
Melissa L. Cook knows a thing or two about taking the road less traveled—sometimes quite literally.
In 1995, Melissa and her husband, Elgin, packed up their family and moved from Wyoming to remote Alaska. What was supposed to be an adventure became a twenty-year chapter of their lives, much of it spent in small, isolated communities where groceries arrived by plane or barge, neighbors depended on one another, and the wilderness was never very far from the front door.
Those years eventually inspired Melissa’s award-winning, bestselling memoir, The Call of the Last Frontier, a #1 Top-Rated book on Amazon. Her experiences also gave her the setting she would later return to in fiction.
After moving back to Wyoming, Melissa found a different kind of adventure. She is the co-creator and on-camera adventurer on the YouTube show Wyoming Jeepers, where she and Elgin explore the backroads, trails, mountains, and forgotten corners of Wyoming.
Today, Melissa has returned to Alaska—at least on the page. Her Tea Creek romance series is set in a fictional Southeast Alaska community inspired by the places she knew during her twenty years there. The people and stories are fictional, but the isolation, weather, wilderness, floatplanes, boats, logging roads, wildlife, and peculiarities of small-town Alaska come from a world she knows firsthand.
When she isn’t writing, Melissa can usually be found exploring Wyoming with Elgin, working on their latest project, or heading down a backroad just to see where it goes.
