Show Notes
Sharma and Sushila were ahead of their time in marrying for love and across castes in early 1950s India. When their oldest daughter is nine, they leave their home and family for Sharma to take an academic position in astrophysics in America. Sushila takes care of their home, raises their girls, manages to complete a doctorate, and becomes a feminist philosopher. The three daughters grow into young women, each navigating school and community during the upheaval of the 1960s. While coming to terms with their parents’ flaws and building relationships and lives, they learn to count on each other through marriage and divorce, children and careers. Sutra Americana (U Wisconsin Press, 2026) is a sweeping and beautiful immigrant saga about identity, memory, forgiveness, and love.
Monona Wali began her professional career with an M.F.A. in film production from UCLA Film School, where she was awarded the Lynn Weston Memorial Scholarship for an outstanding female graduate student. Her thesis film, “Grey Area,” is included in the LA Rebellion, curated by the UCLA Film and Television Archives to highlight groundbreaking work done by BIPOC filmmakers in the 70s and 80s. She co-directed and edited “Maria’s Story,” a first-person account of a guerrilla leader in the Salvadoran Civil War. “Maria’s Story” received national airing on P.O.V., the award-winning PBS documentary series. The film also received the Blue Ribbon Edward R. Murrow Award at the American Film Festival, among many other awards.
In 1988, she began her second career as a fiction writer, taking classes at Santa Monica College with the legendary teacher Jim Krusoe. Sutra Americana is her second novel. Her debut novel, My Blue Skin Lover, the story of a woman who takes the god Shiva as her lover, won the 2015 Independent Book Publishers Gold Award for Multicultural Fiction. Many of her stories and essays were published in literary journals including Air/Light, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Folio Literary Journal, Juked, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Santa Monica Review. One received a Special Mention in the 2025 Pushcart Prize Anthology. She is deeply rooted in the Los Angeles literary community through several workshops, and is a former teacher of adult students, incarcerated juveniles, and veterans. She is an alum of Hedgebrook, Breadloaf, and the Community of Writers.
Monona Wali was born in Benares, India, and lives in Los Angeles, CA. Her first home in America was in Madison, Wisconsin, and she is named after the lake there, Lake Monona. Her family moved often as her father advanced in his academic career. She has a particular fondness for Hyde Park, Chicago, and many of the chapters of “Sutra Americana” are set there. She divides her time between Santa Monica and Joshua Tree in the Mojave Desert. She loves the desert and is working on a book of essays viewing themes of home and belonging through the lens of an immigrant. She is passionate about the outdoors but is also a homebody who loves knitting, macrame, and having a cup of tea with a good book!
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