Melissa Henderson is an essayist, journalist, editor, magazine writer, and novelist with bylines at The Los Angeles Times, The Cauldron, and BrandX. She recently co-wrote The Sacred & the Divine, a YA supernatural-romantic thriller that came out Oct. 2025 on the Melissa De La Cruz Studios imprint at Disney Books. She’s currently polishing the last draft of her next book, an epistolary coming-of-age novel set at a yoga retreat in ’90s backwater New England that explores female identity, sexuality, and personal reinvention. Next up, a basket of outlines that are mewling to be fed, and fast. Raised in the Canadian backwoods, Melissa spent much of her life scatterpulting across Greater North America—from Boston to the Laurentian mountains to Toronto to NYC to the Berkshires to Seattle to Santa Cruz to Los Angeles to Montreal—and now hangs out in Scottish hill country with her familiars, her blood-oathed accomplice and their two ferociously pretty catbeasts.