Author Photos
Photos by Paul Goyette
Full-Length Bio
Mary Anne Mohanraj is author of Bodies in Motion (HarperCollins) and fourteen other titles. Bodies in Motion was a finalist for the Asian American Book Awards, a USA Today Notable Book, and has been translated into six languages. She’s received a Locus Award, a CFW Breaking Barriers Award, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, and more.
Mohanraj is Clinical Associate Professor of fiction and literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago, serves as Executive Director of DesiLit (desilit.org), and directs the Kriti Festival of Art and Literature (kritifestival.org). She founded and served for ten issues as editor-in-chief of Jaggery, a South Asian literary journal (jaggerylit.com). She serves on the board of her local garden club – she loves incorporating garden harvests into her recipes – and was elected to the Oak Park library board in 2017.
Mohanraj was born in Sri Lanka in 1971, and moved to America at the age of 2. When she was young, her family would go back often to visit grandparents and other relatives, until the war intervened. Since peace returned, Mohanraj has started travelling back to Sri Lanka more often for research and pleasure. She’s currently working on a video game, Sigiriya, based on 5th century Sri Lanka, in partnership with the company, Rad Magpie, and is developing a food tour and writing retreat to be held on the island.
When she’s not cooking, Mohanraj is writing science fiction and superhero stories; recent books include The Stars Change (Sri Lankans in space), and stories for George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards anthology series. She lives in a creaky old Victorian in Oak Park, just outside Chicago, with her partner, Kevin, two children, and assorted animals.
To explore more of her writing, visit http://maryannemohanraj.com/.
100-Word Bio
Mary Anne Mohanraj is author of A Feast of Serendib, Bodies in Motion, The Stars Change, and twelve other titles. Other recent publications include stories for George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series, Perennial: A Garden Romance (Tincture), stories at Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and Lightspeed, and an essay in Roxane Gay’s Unruly Bodies.
Mohanraj founded Hugo-nominated and World Fantasy Award-winning speculative literature magazine Strange Horizons, and serves as Executive Director of both DesiLit (desilit.org) and the Speculative Literature Foundation (speculativeliterature.org). She is Clinical Associate Professor of fiction and literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. www.maryannemohanraj.com