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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Climate change is causing the American West to experience what’s now being called a megadrought…the worst water shortage in 1,200 years. The Ogallala Aquifer is a huge underground water source supplying eight states where it may seem safely stored away. But as one ranching community in southeast Wyoming is finding out…that water is disappearing. Part of the problem is that water law hasn’t kept up with emerging science.
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This week in Bozeman, librarians, historians, scientists and the public gathered to share ideas for how to preserve the history of Yellowstone National Park. This year is the park's 150th anniversary. Dayton Duncan, an award winning author and a collaborator on Ken Burns documentaries for over 30 years, gave the keynote address at the Conversations on Collecting Yellowstone Conference. Wyoming Public Radio's Melodie Edwards sat down with Duncan and asked him about the title of his talk, "Happenstance and History."
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This year marks the 150th anniversary of Yellowstone National Park and historians, librarians and the general public will gather in Bozeman for a conference to celebrate the park’s history and collaborate on preserving it.
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A recent study shows that groundwater could decrease by a third in the Colorado River Basin in the next 30 years due to climate change.
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Struggling ranchers protect threatened grasslands by offering carbon credits (and get paid to do it)Ranchers often consider themselves caretakers of their land and it's that kind of thinking that's motivating them to sign up for an innovative new approach called rangeland carbon offsetting. Wyoming Public Radio's Melodie Edwards sat down with Birch Malotky who recently reported on the issue for the University of Wyoming Ruckelshaus Institute's magazine.
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Applications to drill eight high capacity water wells in Laramie County continue to move forward, even though, last fall, a control area advisory board recommended they be rejected. Since then, the case's hearing examiner submitted an 85-page proposed order to the state engineer recommending the water wells be approved.
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