Melissa Gay was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on July 18, 1968, and left in 1969, unfortunately before ever hearing about Kansas City Jazz. She started drawing not long after that, mostly on walls. She graduated in 1986 from a small high school near Birmingham, Alabama, called Indian Springs, where she had enrolled in her first painting class during her senior year. She dropped the class after three weeks, convinced she would never learn how to paint. In 1990 she received a bachelor's degree in Studio Art from The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, with honors in painting. She dabbled in fine art until 1997, when she realized that she no longer knew what the term "Fine Art" meant, and that her true passion was actually fun art. Thus she began a much more interesting career by showing fantasy and roleplaying-related works at sci-fi/fantasy conventions.

Mermaid Touches the Sky

Wuxia

Melissa currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband Brian Cooksey, an orange cat named Max, and a tarantula named Pythagoras. She has worked as a cashier, a biology graduate teaching assistant, a field botanist, and a scientific illustrator, and she has co-authored four manuals on rare plant identification for Tennessee state foresters. Besides art, her hobbies/ways of life include practising Wado-ryu Karate, playing and gamemastering favorite RPG's (see links page), singing, writing, reading, sewing, and playing around on her guitar and folk harp. To this day, she wonders if she will ever learn how to paint!