Monona Wali is an award-winning novelist, short story writer and filmmaker. My Blue Skin Lover, her debut novel, won the 2015 IPPY Gold award for best multicultural fiction from Independent Publishers and was selected for the SELF-e program of California libraries highlighting independent authors. Her stories have been published in The Santa Monica Review, Stone Canoe, Tiferet, Catamaran, A Journal of South Asian American Literature and other literary journals. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing at Santa Monica College and Antioch University and volunteers with Inside Out Writers, an organization that offers writing classes for incarcerated youth.