2015 Alumna
Cottage: Waterfall
BIO: Monona Wali taught memoir writing for eighteen years. Her students included older adults, incarcerated youth, veterans 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. In addition to being a teacher, she is an award-winning novelist, short story writer and filmmaker. Her novel Sutra Americana will be forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press in Fall 2026. Her debut novel, My Blue Skin Lover, won the 2015 Independent Book Publishers award for multicultural fiction. She is an alum of Hedgebrook, Breadloaf, and the 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, Airlight, and Juked. Prior to writing fiction, she was a filmmaker. Maria’s Story, a documentary about a peasant woman who becomes a leader in the FMLN won a Blue Ribbon at the American Film & Video Festival, and Grey Area is included in the LA Rebellion, curated by the UCLA Film and Television Archives to highlight groundbreaking work done by BIPOC filmmakers in the 70’s and 80’s.
Born in Benares, India, she currently lives in Los Angeles.