About
Monica West is a novelist originally from Cleveland, Ohio. Her critically acclaimed debut novel Revival Season was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Barnes and Noble Discover selection, and shortlisted for the Virginia Commonwealth University Cabell First Novelist Award. Revival Season also won the Christianity Today Book Award.
Revival Season was called “spellbinding” and garnered comparisons to Alice Walker, James Baldwin, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in its Washington Post review. The New York Times called Revival Season “atmospheric,” “layered,” and “invigorating.” Monica’s second novel, Light the Way, about a young woman’s desperate search for her missing older sister, will be published by Putnam on February 2, 2027.
Monica received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow. She was a John Gardner Fellow in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a 50th Anniversary Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and an Alice Judson Hayes Social Justice Fellow at Ragdale. She has received additional fellowships and funding from Kimbilio Fiction, Hedgebrook, and Hawthornden.
Monica has taught fiction writing in the graduate and undergraduate programs at the University of San Francisco, the University of Washington, and the University of Iowa. She has also taught at the Community of Writers and regularly teaches creative writing courses at Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop.