Journalist
Montana Watering Holes: The Big Sky's Best Bars, published in 2009 by Globe/Pequot Press, is a blend of history, legend and first-person reporting about a phenomenon known well beyond the state's borders.
Joan is an award-winning magazine editor and successful editor of many trade and academic titles, including No Man's Garden: Thoreau and a New Vision for Civilization and Nature (Berkeley Publishing Group, 1999) by Daniel B. Botkin; Principles of Biology (Nature USA, 2012); and Environmental Science: Earth as a Living Planet, Daniel B. Botkin and Ed Keller (Wiley & Sons, 1995 and 2014).
Editor
As editor of the University of Montana's Montanan, she won more than 20 awards, among them a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Association of Educational Publishers for most improved publication, and two Maggie awards from the Western Publications Association.
Writer
Her articles have appeared in many publications, including Pacific Standard, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Outside, Progressive, Environment, Popular Science Monthly, VIA magazine, Miller-McCune, BioCycle, High Country News, Planet-Profit Report.
A sampling of stories:
Is Butte, Montana, the Davos of the Rockies?, Pacific Standard
Battery Co. Claims Novel Electrolye Will Do The Trick, Clean Technica
Power Struggle: The Numbers Behind the Energy Rhetoric, High Country News
Joan Carol Melcher
A History in the Making, Pacific Standard
Joan's story about Julie Cajune, a Salish Indian educator, brought Cajune to the attention of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and she received a $1.4 million grant to continue bringing her work in American Indian history and culture to a mass audience.