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Monica Mody, PhD, is a writer, educator, and dancer advancing earth-based and decolonial feminist worldviews. Dr. Mody comes to her writing, scholarship, and poetry as a cross-genre, border-crossing practitioner. Her dissertation, titled "Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-secular South Asian Borderlands: A Critical Hermeneutics and Autohistoria/teoría for Decolonial Feminist Consciousness," received the 2020 Kore Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology awarded by the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. She has also been a recipient of the Cultural Integration Fellowship Integral Scholarship (CIIS), Sparks Prize (University of Notre Dame), the Zora Neale Hurston Award (Naropa University), and the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing. Dr. Mody was born in Ranchi, India, and lives in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land.

Mody, Monica. “Serpent, Earth, Healing, Initiation.” In The Land Remembers Us: Women, Myth, and Nature, edited by Sid Reger and Mary Jo Neitz, 3:275–92. 

Mody, Monica. “The Borderlands Feminine: A Feminist, Decolonial Framework for Re-Membering Motherlines in South Asia/Transnational Culture.” Integral Review 13, no. 1 (July 2017): 87–98. 

Mody, Monica. Kala Pani. San Marcos, CA: 1913 Press, 2013.  

Dr. Mody’s full-length poetry collection Bright Parallel is forthcoming from Copper Coin, and a chapbook Ordinary Annals from above/ground press. Her poems have also appeared or are forthcoming in literary journals including Indian Quarterly, Almost Island, Boston Review, and Poetry International, and in anthologies including Extinction Violin: The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Poets, What is Time: An Anthology of New Indian Writing, Hibiscus: Poems that Heal and Empower, and &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing.