photo credit: Maya Wali Richardson

Monona Wali is an award-winning novelist, short story writer and filmmaker. Her novel Sutra Americana will be forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Fall 2026. Her debut novel, My Blue Skin Lover, won the 2015 Independent Book Publishers Gold Award for Multicultural Fiction. Many of her stories and essays have been published in literary journals including Air/Light, Folio Literary Journal, Juked, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Santa Monica Review. One received Special Mention in the 2025 Pushcart Prize Anthology.

She is deeply rooted in the Los Angeles literary community through several workshops, as well as a former teacher of adult students through Santa Monica Emeritus College, incarcerated juveniles through the InsideOut Writers Program, and veterans at the VA. She also taught at Antioch University in the Undergraduate Program. She is an alum of Hedgebrook, Breadloaf, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.  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. She is the co-director of the documentary film Maria’s Story about a peasant woman from El Salvador who became a leader in the FMLN.

Born in Benares, India, she lives in Los Angeles.