Melissa Wiley is the author of Skull Cathedral, a book interweaving thoughts on the body’s vestigial organs with autobiographical fragments, which won the 2019 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Contest and was judged by Paul Lisicky. She has also published the personal essay collection Antlers in Space and Other Common Phenomena. Were she more coordinated, she would have become a trapeze artist with the circus. As it is, she struggles to say what feels true but believes the struggling is what matters.