At the I-Park Foundation, East Haddam, Connecticut, November 2021. Photo credit: Lydia Blaisdell
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About Monica MacansantosMonica Macansantos was born in Baguio, Philippines, a year after the Marcoses were driven out of power by the EDSA People Power Revolution of 1986. A few months after the Baguio earthquake of 1990, she and her family moved to Newark, Delaware, where she spent the next five years of her life. They then returned to the Philippines, where she spent the rest of her childhood and young adulthood, graduating magna cum laude from the University of the Philippines-Diliman in 2007.
A former James A. Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, her books include the forthcoming essay collection about grief, home, and belonging, Returning to My Father's Kitchen, to be published by Northwestern University Press under its Curbstone imprint in 2024, and the story collection, Love and Other Rituals, published by Grattan Street Press in 2022. She is the daughter of the late poet Francis C. Macansantos, from whom she inherited her love of writing, laughter, and life. You can learn more about him here. |
publications |
Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, The Hopkins Review, Bennington Review, The Masters Review, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and Katherine Mansfield and Children (Edinburgh University Press), among other places. Her work has also been translated into Czech (Kuřata v hadí kleci: Prague, Argo Press, 2020) and Spanish (Arbolarium, Antologia Poetica de los Cinco Continentes: Bogota, Colegio Bilingüe José Max León, 2019). Learn more about her publications here.
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awards, fellowships, and current projects |
She has received fellowships and scholarships from the Michener Center for Writers, the International Institute of Modern Letters, Hedgebrook, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the I-Park Foundation, Storyknife Writers Retreat, Monson Arts, and the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. Her work has been recognized as Notable in the Best American Essays 2023, 2022, and 2016, and has received finalist and honorable mention citations from the Glimmer Train Fiction Open.
She has recently completed a novel entitled People We Trust about three young people who come of age in Marcos-era Philippines. She is currently working on a second novel, as well as a second story collection about Filipinos at home, in the US, and in New Zealand. |