2015 Alumna
Cottage: Waterfall
BIO: Monona Wali has been teaching memoir writing for fifteen years. Her students include older adults, incarcerated youth, and young writers. She was trained in the Amherst Writers and Artists method, which emphasizes giving agency to each writer to believe in their own voices and stories. Her debut novel, My Blue Skin Lover, won the 2015 Independent Book Publishers award for multicultural fiction. The story of its publication is featured in Behind the Book (University of Chicago Press, 2017). She is an alum of Hedgebrook, Breadloaf, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Many of her stories and essays have been published in literary journals including The Los Angeles Review of Books, Santa Monica Review and Catamaran. One was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Prior to writing fiction, she was a filmmaker. Richard Brody wrote in the New Yorker of my film Grey Area (1984) “With its combination of theatrical vigor and visual intensity, political analysis and constructive exhortation, it reminds me of films by the seminal black American director Oscar Micheaux.”
Born in Benares, India, she lives in Los Angeles where she teaches writing and literature at Santa Monica College.