I'm a co-author of When They Come Home: Ways to Welcome Returning Catholics (Twenty-third Publications, December 2009), which assists parish leaders with setting up programs for returnees. I also contribute to Living Faith, a 650,000-circulation Catholic devotional, and write weekly for Your Daily Tripod (www.yourdailytripod.blogspot.com), a Catholic blog. I am communications chair for Cursillo in the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, and am Web mistress for the local movement's site (www.arlingtoncursillo.org). I am also the assistant director for the St. Davids Christian Writers’ Conference, the second-oldest such conference in the country. I speak at a half dozen or so events per year, primarily on the East Coast. In the past thirteen years, I have spoken at more than a hundred writers’ conferences. I am a member of the Catholic Writers’ Guild, Capital Christian Writers, Virginia Writers Club, and the Eastern Shore Writers’ Association. My consultancy, Editor for You (www.editorforyou.com), has helped hundreds of writers, literary agents, and publishers in the past eight years. You can learn more about the writing side of my life at www.melanierigney.com. Before moving to the Washington, DC, area in 2004 to work for the federal government, I spent nearly five years as the editor of Writer’s Digest, then the nation’s leading writing magazine, including a year as editorial director for Writer’s Digest Books. Earlier, I was managing editor of Advertising Age magazine, a newswoman and manager with United Press International, a publishing manager for Macmillan Computer Publishing and an editor for Thomson Financial Publishing. I live in Arlington, Virginia, and am a member of St. Charles Borromeo Parish.