MCW Alumn Monica Macansantos (MCW 2013) been awarded a Black Mountain Institute 2024-2025 Shearing Fellowship. The fellowship brings writers to the UNLV campus for one year to “join a community of creative writers and scholars in a thriving literary scene in Las Vegas and on the campus of UNLV.” More on the fellowship and this year’s recipients can be found here.
Monica Macansantos holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD from the International Institute of Modern Letters at the Victoria University of Wellington. She is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Returning to My Father’s Kitchen, and the story collection Love and Other Rituals. Her work has been recognized as Notable in the Best American Essays 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2016. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the I-Park Foundation, and others.
Manuel Muñoz is the author of a novel, What You See in the Dark, and the short-story collections Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has been recognized with a Whiting Writer’s Award, three O. Henry Awards, and two selections in Best American Short Stories, and was awarded the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. His most recent collection, The Consequences, was published by Graywolf Press and in the UK by The Indigo Press in October 2022. It was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and longlisted for the Story Prize. It will be published in Italian by Edizioni Black Coffee and in Turkish by Livera Yayinevi. In October 2023, he was honored with a MacArthur Fellowship for “depicting with empathy and nuance the Mexican-American communities of California’s Central Valley.” His frequently anthologized work has appeared in The New York Times, Epoch, and Glimmer Train. His most recent work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, ZYZZYVA, and Freeman’s. A native of Dinuba, California, and a first-generation college student, Manuel graduated from Harvard University and received his MFA in creative writing at Cornell University. He currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.