Melodie Edwards
ReporterMelodie Edwards is the host and producer of WPM's award-winning podcast The Modern West. Her Ghost Town(ing) series looks at rural despair and resilience through the lens of her hometown of Walden, Colorado. She has been a radio reporter at WPM since 2013, covering topics from wildlife to Native American issues to agriculture.
Her civil discourse project called, "I Respectfully Disagree," brought together people in the state modeling how people find compromise to make change. One of these conversations, "Time Heals All Wounds," won a national PMJA award. She is also the recipient of a national PRNDI award for her investigation of the reservation housing crisis and several regional Edward R. Murrow Awards, two for "best use of sound."
Melodie grew up in Walden, Colorado where her father worked in the oilfield and timber industries and her mother was the editor of the Jackson County Star. Later her parents ran an Orvis fly fishing store there. She graduated with an MFA from the University of Michigan on a Colby Fellowship and received two Hopwood Awards for fiction and nonfiction. She was the first person to receive the Pattie Layser Greater Yellowstone Writing Fellowship through the Wyoming Arts Council and was the recipient of the Doubleday Wyoming Arts Council Award for Women. She's the author of two books, Akoreka and the League of Crows, a young adult novel, and Hikes Around Fort Collins. Melodie and her husband own Night Heron Books and Coffeehouse. She also loves to putz in the garden and backpack and ski in the mountains with her twin daughters, her husband and her dog.
Email: medward9@uwyo.edu
Phone: 307-766-2405
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Open Spaces show rundown for April 5, 2024
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The new season of Wyoming Public Radio’s podcast "The Modern West" just dropped its first episode. But the format is pretty different from how we’ve done things in the past. This season, we’re going out in the field with some of the reporters you’ll recognize from "Open Spaces."
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A recent decision to reintroduce wolves has created division between rural and urban Coloradoans. But wolves have actually been there a while. A few years ago, a couple migrated down from Wyoming to settle in the mountain valley of North Park southwest of Laramie. It’s given the ranchers there a headstart on adjusting to a new reality.
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Urban wildfires in unlikely places are likely to become more prevalent as the climate warms, so homeowners across the American West should consider their immediate risk. That’s according to a panel of wildfire survivors and experts assembled for a Facebook Live event with Wyoming Public Media’s Modern West podcast.
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A group of University of Wyoming (UW) students is collecting signatures for a petition to convince Wyoming’s U.S. congressional delegation to vote against a bill recently introduced in congress by Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke. It would expel Palestinians living in the U.S. and prohibit others from entering.
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The war in Gaza might seem far away to many Wyomingites but it’s very personal to one member of Laramie’s community. Abdalrahim Abuwarda is a Palestinian student at the University of Wyoming, here in the U.S. on a Fulbright Fellowship. He left behind a wife and three small children and now lives in terror of bad news from home. Wyoming Public Radio’s Melodie Edwards sat down with him to hear his story.
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In the new Modern West podcast series, a family loses their beloved home in Colorado’s Marshall FireThe Modern West podcast just released the trailer for its new series. “The Burn Scar” tells the story of podcast producer Ariel Lavery, how her parents were evacuated, and how her family lost their home in the Marshall Fire, an urban grassfire that burned into the suburbs of Boulder in the middle of winter in 2021. The Modern West’s host Melodie Edwards sat down with Ariel to talk about why she decided to produce a podcast about this devastating event, and starts by asking what made the Marshall Fire so unusual.