Writer,
Traveler.
Author of Returning to My Father’s Kitchen: Essays (2025) and Love and Other Rituals: Selected Stories (2022). A former Shearing Fellow with the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, and James A. Michener Fellow with the University of Texas at Austin. Baguio girl.
Books
Returning to My Father’s Kitchen: Essays (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, 2025)
“Returning to My Father’s Kitchen is about what is left behind—the ghosts, apparitions, and hauntings of people. This book is bold and sharply observed, giving voice to those lost in the margins of literature. Intimate and candid, any reader would feel solace in Macansantos’s company.” —Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers: A Memoir
“A book about getting knocked around and the supernatural strength it takes to get back up again. A portrait of the artist as sous chef to a dearly departed dad, tango-dancing necromancer, and—most deliciously—world-class literary bruiser. Sudden and mysterious as a perfectly executed recipe, or grief itself. Unmistakably magical.” —Greg Marshall, author of Leg
Love and Other Rituals: Selected Stories (Grattan Street Press, 2022)
"I loved these beautiful stories by Monica Macansantos, who writes with such beauty and delicacy about desire, home, longing, loneliness, duty, and hope—that is, what it means to be human. Every story is terrific, different, surprising. I can’t wait to see what she does next."
—Elizabeth McCracken, winner of the 2015 Story Prize and author of The Hero of This Book, The Souvenir Museum and Bowlaway
“In Monica Macansantos’s exquisitely rendered stories about the Filipino experience, both in the old country and abroad, homeland is not a place, but a pang. Wisely and compassionately observed, her dislocated characters long for home with the same restrained ardor they yearn for connection – one that, because Macansantos knows too well how an upset heart turns, remains always within sight, and yet heartbreakingly elusive. Her splendid writing is stirring.”
—Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, author of Barefoot Dogs: Stories