Michaele Weissman is an author and writing teacher based in Chevy Chase, Maryland who has published four books and hundreds of articles. In August 2023, Algonquin Press published her literary memoir, The Rye Bread Marriage, in which she tells her husband’s family story and explores his obsession with Latvian rye bread while pondering the nature of long-term marriage. Her point of view is intimate; her tone is often humorous; but her concerns—the impact of war and dislocation, overcoming trauma, tolerating difference—run deep.
Her previous book, the “coffee narrative” God in A Cup (Wiley), is widely credited with putting the specialty coffee industry on the map. It has been translated to both Korean and Japanese—the Korean edition is especially popular. She is the co-author (with Deborah Prothrow Stith, M.D.) of Deadly Consequences (Harper Perennial) an examination of teenage gun violence. A History of Women in America (Bantam), co-authored with Carol Hymowitz, has sold a quarter of a million copies and is still in print four decades after publication.
Michaele’s articles appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Forbes, Crain’s Chicago Business, Working Mother and dozens of other print and online publications.
She leads writing workshops at Politics and Prose, Washington, D.C.’s beloved independent bookstore. For many years she taught writing to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts at New Directions, a psychoanalytically oriented writing program based in Washington, D.C. from which she graduated.
Michaele has been married for forty years to John Melngailis, an emeritus professor of electrical engineering, who owns Black Rooster Food, a small company that markets authentic Latvian rye bread. She married her husband because he is as obsessed with food as she and he is just as hospitable.
Together they have three children and four young grandchildren, all of whom, even the littlest, sit down to dinner every evening with their parents.
Michaele lives, writes, and hosts friends and family in Chevy Chase, Maryland. A lifelong swimmer, she does some of her best thinking in the pool. She earned a BA in European history from Brandeis University.