Melissa Rose Lawrence was born in New Jersey. Melissa’s interest in Japanese culture and society began in the late 1990s when she began watching anime, Japanese cartoons. During her free time, Melissa continued to learn more about Japanese culture through the anime she watched and the manga she read. Her love of Japanese culture grew so strong that she soon spent an hour a day self-teaching herself the two Japanese syllabaries—Hiragana and Katakana, along with some basic Japanese grammar and Kanji, Chinese characters used in the Japanese writing system. Melissa studied Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Spanish at New York University's School of Professional Studies.

Melissa also studied digital photography at New York Institute of Photography. In addition, Melissa passed Level One and Level Two of the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi Test, a Chinese language proficiency and received a near perfect score on both tests. In her free time Melissa likes to study Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. She also likes to watch anime and read manga. However, the one thing Melissa especially enjoys above all is the experience of publishing her first light novel, The Autumnal Winds.