Melissa Dias-Mandoly

Melissa Dias-Mandoly – Designer

Award-winning designer and artist. I especially love designing poetry books, and have experience with fiction and academic texts.

Overview

I'm a designer, artist, writer, and editor. I have a passion for poetry and love to be creative. I'm currently the Production Editor at University of Pittsburgh Press, where I design ten to fifteen books annually (both cover and interior), and have experience with designing flyers, posters, and other marketing materials. Recently, one of my cover designs was featured in the AUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show. I also designed the new UPP logo! Outside of the press, I've done freelance book design for Autumn House Press as well as original art and poster design for an independent touring poet. I'm comfortable working with ideas that a client already has or coming up with something completely new. I look forward to new challenges!
Services
Non-Fiction
History Life Sciences
Fiction
Literary Fiction Poetry Short Story
Languages
English
Certifications
  • Bachelor's Degree in Poetry and Film Studies

Work experience

Self-employed

Jun, 2018 — Present

- Cover and interior design for prose and poetry books.
- Composition of original art and poster design for a book launch tour.
- Creating web- and printer-ready files.

University of Pittsburgh Press

Jan, 2014 — Present

- Cover and interior design of ten to fifteen books annually.
- Finding and contracting artists for covers.
- Creating printer-ready files
- Design of various ads, flyers, posters, and other marketing materials.
- I also designed the new logo, which was chosen from a group of options from my colleagues.

Portfolio

Winner of the AWP 2017 Donald Hall Prize for PoetryIn ancient fertility carvings, artists would drill holes into the woman’s body to signify penetrability, which is the basis of Autobiography of a Wound: allowing those wounds and puncture marks to speak throug... read more
Winner of the 2016 Donald Hall Prize in PoetryLauren Clark’s poems move lucidly, depicting beautiful struggles of distrust, dream, grief, and intimacy. They show such conflicts through entrancing narrative drive and song-like abandon. In their unpredictable, u... read more
When her “smart” phone keeps asking her to autocorrect her name to Denise Richards, Denise Duhamel begins a journey that takes on celebrity, sex, reproduction, and religion with her characteristic wit and insight. The poems in Scald engage feminism in two ways... read more
Winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award, poetry categoryWhat is it like living today in the chaos of a city that is at once brutal and beautiful, heir to immigrant ancestors "who supposed their children's children would be rich and free?" What is it to l... read more
In his third poetry collection, Primer, Aaron Smith grapples with the ugly realities of the private self, in which desire feels more like a trap than fulfillment. What is the face we prepare in our public lives to distract others from our private grief?Smith's... read more
The poems in What We Did While We Made More Guns investigate the place where economic failure meets a widening acculturation of violence—a kind of Great Acceleration of soul extinction set in this spectacularly uneasy moment in American history. Cutting, comic... read more
Travel has always been Barbara Hamby's muse, and in Bird Odyssey she hits the road hard, riding a train across Siberia, taking a car trip from Memphis to New Orleans on Highway 61, and following The Odyssey from Troy to Ithaka. The concatenation of images rele... read more