New newspaper owners host town halls to connect with communities

Melodie 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.