Monona Wali is an award-winning novelist, short story writer and filmmaker. Her debut novel, My Blue Skin Lover, won the 2015 Independent Book Publishers Gold award for multicultural fiction. It is soon to be released as an audiobook featuring Grammy award winner Neela Vaswani as the narrator. The story of its publication is featured in Behind the Book (University of Chicago Press, 2017). She is deeply rooted in the Los Angeles literary community through several workshops, as well as a teacher of adult students, incarcerated juveniles, and veterans. 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 Folio Literary Journal, Juked, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Santa Monica Review. One was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Prior to writing fiction, she was a filmmaker. Her film 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. Richard Brody wrote in the New Yorker of 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 teachs writing and literature at Santa Monica College. In addition to teaching, she also edits two literary journals for the college that showcases the writing of older adults. She volunteer taught incarcerated young men through the InsideOut Writers program for seven years, an experience that left her deeply committed to bringing writing to the underserved.