Melvin D. Epp is a Wheaton College graduate with an MS in botany from the University of Connecticut and a PhD in genetics from Cornell University. Following a corporate career in biological research, he retired to his ancestral farm near Whitewater, KS to write. Epp has completed an anthology of his mother's prairie folk poetry, which describes the history of the immigration of his West Prussian Anabaptist ancestors in 1876 and the community that his ancestors created in northwest Butler County, KS. Epp has used the collection of 106 poems by Marie Harder Epp to extract the history of Harder family from 1876 to 1995. This includes local reaction to the German language and conscription during the two world wars, as well as the development of a prairie farming community with a church, cemeteries, and schools. Epp is an avid gardener and has served since 2002 as the president of the Wichita Organic Garden Club. He has been named an Honorary Master Gardener of Sedgwick County. He has served on the Board of Directors of Kauffman Museum in North Newton. His current writing project is a genealogical review of his Epp ancestry.
"Epp weaves a fascinating montage of stories, photos, and personal reminiscences that frame the collected poems of his mother, a remarkable and strong woman who, as a farm wife on the Kansas prairies, reared eight children and still found time to reflect on the rugged beauty and the people who surrounded her. Her poetry gives 'a face and a heart' to the times, the community, and the land both she and Melvin loved so evidently."
--John Yoder, Visiting Professor of Education and Leadership, Eastern Mennonite University
"Marie Harder Epp experienced almost all of the twentieth century from the same Kansas farmhouse where she was born. Her amazing bilingual poetry harnesses a strong, sturdy prairie voice that transports the reader into a female realm of family, farming, weddings, births, and funerals that marked the meaning of her days and of ours. Melvin Epp has translated and wrapped her poems in the context and relationships that illuminated her words and her rural world."
--Mark Jantzen, Professor of History, Bethel College