Melanie Morey Jeschke (pronounced jes-key), a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and graduated from the University of Virginia as a Phi Beta Kappa with an Honors degree in English Literature and a minor in European and English History. She also holds a Master of Arts in English Literature from George Mason University and took courses on Jane Austen and Shakespeare at Oxford University. Melanie is an adjunct professor of English and has taught composition and literature at Marymount University, Patrick Henry College, and Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA-Manassas).

Melanie lived a semester in Paris and has traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East. She has made numerous trips to Great Britain and organized a group tour to Scotland and England that included a stay at J.R.R. Tolkien’s Merton College in Oxford. In 2009 she attended the English Literature summer school at Exeter College (Tolkien's undergraduate college) at Oxford University. She has attended seven conferences on C. S. Lewis at Oxford and Cambridge Universities ("Oxbridge" Summer Institute) and served as the Oxford information hostess and "Inklings" walking- tour guide for the C. S. Lewis Foundation. In 2014 she was an Oxbridge Summer Institute faculty member as well, teaching a seminar on Jane Austen in Cambridge. Melanie's oldest daughter Katherine also attended Oxford University for a term and played on the University Women's football (soccer) team.   

Melanie's various trips to the UK inspired her novels The Oxford Chronicles: Inklings containing the sequel Intentions (2004); Expectations (2005); and Evasions, a “prequel” set in WWII, (2006). An earlier edition of Inklings (without Intentions) was published by Xulon Press in 2002. Her trips also inspired Jillian Dare: a modern retelling of Jane Eyre (2009, 2021), a contemporary romantic suspense novel set in both England and the Virginian countryside. 

A free-lance travel writer, Melanie contributed the Oxford chapter to the Rick Steves’ England guidebook. She is a member of the Capital Christian Writers Fellowship as well as three book clubs, taught high-school English (both public & private), and home-schooled most of her nine children. Melanie lectures on Lewis and Tolkien, Oxford, and writing, and gives inspirational talks to all manner of groups, including university classes, women’s clubs, young professionals, MOPS (Mothers of Pre-Schoolers), teens, and school children.

A fourth-generation pastor’s wife (her father Dr. Earl Morey was a Presbyterian minister & Bible scholar), Melanie resides in the greater DC area with her husband Bill Jeschke, a soccer coach and the Senior Pastor of The King’s Chapel, a non-denominational Christian church in Fairfax, Virginia.

​

​

Melanie Jeschke Press Kit

​