Author Melanie K. Patterson’s most recent book is the nonfiction The Truth About Sex Trafficking: A Survivor’s Story and What It Means for All of Us, self-published under the Forged In Words Press imprint. Melanie also authored Images of America: Cullman, published by Arcadia Press in 2013. Melanie has a B.A. in Anthropology and studied History at the graduate level. She has almost twenty years of journalism experience at newspapers in Alabama and Colorado. Melanie served eight years as a U.S. Army Reserve journalist, where she completed assignments in France, El Salvador, Bosnia-Herzegovina and across the United States. She is also a welder, a welding instructor, and a hobbyist blacksmith. She lives in north Alabama with her family.