Melissa dalton bradford biography templates
At A Glance
Melissa Dalton Bradford raised four children in the midst of an international life: Norway, France, Singapore, Germany. But what appears glamorous to many has its costs, and Melissa honestly talks about the lack of community and permanence that has defined her years abroad. She also reveals how important those intangibles can be when struck with a tragedy, like the loss of her 18-year-old son in a drowning accident, and how we all can learn to mourn and comfort more compassionately. Melissa’s memoir, Global Mom: A Memoir, was published this summer.
Would you please describe the trajectory of the story that you’ve written about in your recently published memoir?
The book begins when we had been married for seven years, Randall and I, and we were living in the New York City area. It was my husband’s first job and at that point we had two little children, Parker and Claire. I had been, as I describe in the book, busy following a few different career trajectories: I was a full time mother; I was teaching writing part time at a local college; and I was launching a career as a musical theater actress. And it was right in the middle of a musical that I was in that my husband received an offer pretty much out of the blue for us to move to Scandinavia for two or three years. As it turned out, that move ended up lasting a couple of decades. As I describe in the book, we had already lived in Vienna as a young couple before we had had children, and then when our first child, Parker, was a newborn we had lived in Hong Kong. We had both served German-speaking missions and I had studied in Vienna and lived in other places in Austria, so this idea of living “foreignly” was not that far-fetched for us.
You got the call out of the blue?
When Randall targeted companies to work with, he was deliberate in seeking for positions that would land us on an international trajectory. And so this company knew from the very first assignment that he was given, that we w Brigham Young University Global Missionary Work In 1991, Melissa Dalton-Bradford graduated and obtained her master’s degree in comparative literature. While attending school, Melissa was a part of the honors program, as well as attending the BYU semesters abroad in Salzburg, Austria and Vienna, Austria. After graduating Melissa found numerous fields of work such as becoming an author in 1992, becoming a consultant for the past 8 years, and she became a co-founder of two humanitarian non-profit organizations, one starting in 2015 and the other in 2017. Melissa is also a refugee advocate since the summer of 2015. Amongst other things that Melissa has done, Melissa has also become a New York City Broadway Actress for a period of time and then moved to Paris to continue this one of her passions. Melissa takes her businesses global. She has lived outside the United States for 26 years in 9 countries and speaking 6 different languages. Melissa is active in Global Transition and she's on the Board of Women's Literary Journal. Melissa has been involved in the Media doing many Television Interviews and Radio shows as well. Melissa has been the Honorary Vocalist at the European Chamber of Commerce in Singapore and she received the AML Memoir of the Year for Best Book, "Global Mom" which was published in 2013. Melissa has published other books such as "I'm Lost and Living Onward" in 2014, "Fire in the Pasture" in 2011, she's been anthologized in a book called "Dance With Them" in 2010, and anthologized in another book called "Transitions." Melissa was raised in a home where her parents encourage cross cultural interest and so they always had foreign exchange students their home. They traveled quite a bit as well. Early on in life, Melissa parent ByUte Limacher-Rieboldon In “Global Mom: Eight Countries, Sixteen Addresses, Five Languages, One Family“, Melissa Dalton-Bradford takes us on a gripping journey through the global life of her family. Written in a compelling and eloquent style, this book is about the twenty year long adventure of Melissa Dalton-Bradford’s family in Oslo, Versailles, New Jersey, Paris, Munich, Singapore and Geneva. Starting from her Parisian apartment, the author introduces the massive Norwegian farm table which is not only the constant companion during their movings, but serves as anchor of the family and their friends. It is the pivot around which their lives revolve vertiginously: “our table is the heart of our home” (p.12). Melissa Dalton-Bradford invites us “to sit and look out my back window, the Jura mountains of France on this side of the house, the Swiss Alps out the other, and I’ll take you as far as my words can manage: to a few special spots far beyond these mountains, to places and people my family and I know well and love much” (p.15). (© by Luc William Bradford) She takes us back to the years the Dalton-Bradford family spent in Norway (chapters 2 to 8) to continue the narrative about France in the chapters 9 to 18. Chapter 19 represents the turning point in this Memoir before the life takes the family to Munich (chapters 20-21), Singapore (chapters 22-23) and Geneva (chapters 24-25), concluding with chapter 26, called In medias res (i.e. “into the middle of things”) where everything coalesces. Melissa Dalton-Bradford eloquently describes how she experienced, adopted and absorbed the different cultures at first hand and how she managed over and over again to “nose-dive” indefatigably into her many different cultural homes. She emphasises several aspects of the different languages she managed to al Global Mom: Eight Countries, Sixteen Addresses, Five Languages, One Family
Global Mom tells the extraordinary story of their family, as they adapt to living in first Norway, then Versailles, stateside, then back in France, in Paris. To this point, it's really Melissa's extraordinary voice and observations that make the story: seeing her persepectives on the cultural differences (and the challenges of raising young children in each culture) was fascinating.
Global Mom: Eight Countries, Sixteen Addresses, Five Languages, One FamilyAnd then tragedy strikes. (Note: this isn't a spoiler--it's a central part of the story). That I knew the tragedy was coming because I've read some of Melissa's writings on the topic in no way made the event less poignant. Melissa's oldest son, Parker, dies in a tragic accident at age 18. And from that point on, the story is shot through with grief, and the struggle to make sense of such an earth-shattering event. No matter where her family lives after that (Munich, Hong Kong, Geneva), what they experience is not just a new location, but an extension of the landscape of grief.
More than anything, this book has me thinking about place: about how place is made up of landscape (built and natural), but also history and culture and most of all people, and the relationships among people.
And of course, I'm still thinking about some of the gorgeous prose passages. Melissa's voice is really quite astounding at times: she comes across as warm, gracious, intelligent, thoughtful, generous and deeply philosophical. Here are two of my favorite passages (if among some of the most devastating):
And as his head tipped gracefully to one si Education
Masters's, Comparative Literature, Brigham Young University (1991)Specialization:
Biography
Expat Since Birth – A Life spent "abroad"