Author of Seeking the God of Ecstasy (O Books, 2010), Melina Costello has devoted 25 years to the practice of meditative disciplines, exploring psychologically sensitive ways to integrate diverse modes of spiritual experience. About her early life she writes, “I grew up in a large family of eleven children in the Midwest. When I was fourteen, my father took our entire family on a five month trek through 30 European countries in a Volkswagen minibus. He hoped I would one day write a book about this grand misadventure, but my heart had another calling--to write about the inner life of the soul.”

Review: "The vibrancy of Costello’s archetypal encounters with the Greek god Dionysus, made even more compelling by her candid writing, testifies to the quality of daring essential for traveling the inward road... In the following journeys, the sensuous, intuitive quality of divine ecstasy is returned to the vine, to the flowering garden of earth, to ivy moist with summer rain, to Luna’s hypnotic dance on the river Styx. These fertile images leap off the page and burrow deeply into the psyche, not soon to be forgotten." --Robert A. Johnson, best-selling author of He, She, We, Inner Gold

  

A poet, children’s book author and teacher in early childhood education, Melina Costello received the Robert Lee Strauss Poetry Prize from the University of Cincinnati where she majored in creative writing and journalism. She is currently pursuing studies in Counseling Psychology at Marylhurst University and lives with her husband in Oregon.