PhD awarded 2018

Monica Macansantos was born and raised in the Philippines, and was a James A. Michener Fellow for Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her MFA in Fiction and Poetry in 2013. She is the author of the essay collection, Returning to My Father's Kitchen, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books in May 2025, and the story collection, Love and Other Rituals. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, The Hopkins Review, Bennington Review, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and The Pantograph Punch, among other places. Her work has been supported with fellowships from artists' residency programs such as Hedgebrook, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the I-Park Foundation, Storyknife Writers Retreat, and Monson Arts, as well as with a Love of Learning Award from the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. Her nonfiction has also been four times recognised as Notable in the Best American Essays 2016, 2021, 2022, and 2023. She is a regular book reviewer for the Colorado Review website.

In 2024 she was awarded the Shearing Fellowship at the Black Mountain Institute, housed in the University of Nevada Las Vegas, to join them for one academic year beginning in late August.

Monica writes: 'My novel, tentatively titled People We Trust, examines the lives of three young people who come of age during the early years of the Marcos dictatorship. In my accompanying critical study, I discussed novels about the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, paying particular attention to Ninotchka Rosca's State of War and Gina Apostol's Gun Dealers Daughter. I refer to fiction written about the Marcos dictatorship as "Martial Law Fiction", a term coined by Gerald T. Burns in his 1994 essay, "Philippine Martial Law Fiction: Phases in the Early Evolution of the Genre", to describe what he calls a genre of historical fiction written specifically about the Marcos years. For purposes of clarity, it is worth mentioning that "Martial Law" is a term used by journalists and scholars alike in the Philippines to refer to the Marcos years.'

Read more

• Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books: Returning to My Father's Kitchen
• Author website
• Grattan Street Press: Love and Other Rituals
• 'The Enemy Within: fictionalising the Marcos regime - a critical study' (PhD thesis critical component)
• Author interview on Love and Other Rituals in The Hopkins Review, October 2022
• 'Leaving Auckland' part one, part two and part three (failbetter.com) - Finalist, Glimmer Train Fiction Open 2016
• 'A Visit to General Lim Street' (excerpt from PhD novel) in Oyster River Pages, September 2020
• 'A Shared Stillness' (essay) in Colorado Review, Spring 2021. Named 'notable' in Best American Essays 2022.
• 'My Father and W.B. Yeats' in The Hopkins Review, Summer 2022. Named 'notable' in the Best American Essays 2023.
• 'The grief of publishing a book without the parent who inspired you' in Literary Hub, October 2022
• '9 Books About the Complexities of Filipino Family Bonds' in Electric Literature, October 2022
• Interviewed by Grace Talusan for the Rumpus, 9 Jan 2023
• 'A Black Comedy Clicked on My Metaphorical Light: How the quirky cruelty of "Ghost World" validated and ennobled my rebellious spirit' for Electric Literature, 23 Jan 2023
• 'Visitors' (short story) in The Hopkins Review, Spring 2023
• 'Returning to My Father's Kitchen' in Lunch Ticket, Issue 17, Summer 2020. Named 'notable' in the Best American Essays 2021 (note: essay is included in a list inserted as an addendum to BAE 2022 anthology, recognising Notable Essays and Nonfiction from 2020).
• Interview with The Rumpus, January 2023
• Black Mountain Institute Shearing Fellowship profile