bio

Monica Macansantos is a former James A. Michener Fellow for Fiction and Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her MFA in Writing. She also holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the Victoria University of Wellington, International Institute of Modern Letters. Her debut collection of stories, Love and Other Rituals, is forthcoming from the University of Melbourne's Grattan Street Press in 2022. 

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, The Hopkins Review, The Masters Review, failbetter, Day One, Your Impossible Voice, Anomaly, Lunch Ticket, Oyster River Pages, Vol.1 Brooklyn, About Place Journal, The Pantograph Punch, Katherine Mansfield and Children (Edinburgh University Press), and VICE​, among other places. Her work has been recognized as Notable in the Best American Essays 2016, and has received finalist and honorable mention citations from the Glimmer Train Fiction Open. 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). 

​She has received fellowships and scholarships from the Michener Center for Writers, Hedgebrook, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the I-Park Foundation, Storyknife Writers Retreat, Moriumius (Japan), the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, and the International Institute of Modern Letters. 

She has recently completed a collection of essays entitled Returning to My Father's Kitchen, and is currently working on a novel entitled ​People We Trust and a second story collection. She has lived in Delaware, Texas, the Philippines, and New Zealand, and loves tango, cooking, swimming, and birds. She also loves writing about her late father, the poet Francis C. Macansantos, from whom she inherited her love of writing, laughter, and life. 

At the I-Park Foundation in Connecticut, November 2021. Photo credit: Lydia Blaisdell