Monona Wali is an award winning author – her novel My Blue Skin Lover won the 2015 Independent Publishers Gold Award for multi-cultural fiction. Her stories have been published in The Santa Monica Review, Stone Canoe, Tiferet, Catamaran and other literary journals. She was the winner of the 2011 Wordstock Short Story Contest judged by Aimee Bender. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing and literature at Santa Monica College and Antioch University and volunteers with InsideOut Writers, an organization that offers writing classes for incarcerated youth. She attended the Community of Writers in 2004. www.mononawali.com