"The MFA program I attended at the University of Notre Dame allowed for and encouraged radical experimentation with form, language, and genre. I was able to familiarize myself with avant-garde currents in art and literature cross-culturally, and any static ideas about what I thought a poem could do exploded during my experimentations at Notre Dame."
— Monica Mody in conversation with Sophia Naz, The Bangalore Review
Dr. Monica Mody moved to the Santa Barbara area to teach as core faculty in the Pacifica Graduate Institute's Mythological Studies MA/PhD Program. Her areas of specialization include decolonial, indigenous, and women of color paradigms and epistemologies; Anzaldúan frameworks; earth-sourced and feminist spirituality and ritual; poetry, divination, oracular speech, and arts-based research; and nondual embodiment, in conversation with ancestral lineages from South Asia. Her most recent full-length poetry collections include Wild Fin (Weavers Press, 2024) and Bright Parallel (Copper Coin, 2023).
Of Wild Fin, Maw Shein Win (author of Storage Unit for the Spirit House) notes how it "weaves the reader through an eclectic warp and weft of grief and fury, rupture and suture, mysticism and calls for climate and social justice." Divya Victor (author of Curb) calls Wild Fin a “A deeply personal and tender contemplation of ecological grief which, in impressionistic and reflective disclosures, asks us to acknowledge our inalienable enmeshment with each other and with the earth.” Of Bright Parallel, Sumana Roy (author of V.I.P.: Very Important Plant) writes "Everywhere inside this book I found soil—living, dying, composting, growing, resting, and restless. I emerged frome very page with some of it in my hands." Sampurna Chattarji (author of Dirty Love) describes Mody's "attunement to the natural world" as "precise," asserting that the "feministic enquiry is utterly embodied . . . she draws all to the brink of the motherpool."
For me, the poem is in some ways a zone of communion where many meanings and horizons can be attained, because, the way my brain works, no monomyth settles it. I am continually doing the work of seeing who I am in relationship with, who is before me inviting me into the task of becoming.
— Monica Mody in conversation with Sophia Naz, The Bangalore Review
Mody is also the author of the cross-genre Kala Pani (1913 Press, 2013), and three chapbooks including Ordinary Annals (above/ground press, 2021). In a review of Kala Pani that appears in Rain Taxi, Elizabeth Robinson writes "With great inventiveness, Mody wends narrative around and within narrative, as though the bonds and bounds of story could twist, Houdini-like, to effect their own escape." Joyelle McSweeney (author of Death Styles) writes "Gender, genre, national identity, multiple languages, and the body's 'natural' borders are all debased and reworked in this queer, unstable mix, which releases energy as it forms and breaks down and forms again."
Her peer-reviewed article, "Arts-based Practices: Research and Transformation in the Academy," was published in the Transformative Power of Art Journal. Tarka Journal published her scholarly essay and poem sequence, "When Yoginis Appear with Animals: Animistic Relational Elements and the Non-Dual Matrix." Her conversation with Pakistani-American poet Sophia Naz, "Roots and Resonance," was published by The Bangalore Review, and a poem "Glasshouse—Anthropocene" came out in Greening the Earth: A Global Anthology of Poetry (Penguin Random House India, 2023). She read at the South Asian Literary and Arts Festival in Menlo College, CA, where she also interviewed poet, curator, and cultural critic Ranjit Hoskote on his aesthetics.
The Center for Black & Indigenous Praxis at the California Institute of Integral Studies invited her to speak on a BIPOC Scholar Panel, and the Department of Women's Spirituality invited her to do a book talk/reading and conversation in conjunction with her two new poetry collections, in October 2023 and then in March 2024. Other presentations included the El Mundo Zurdo Conference and a Scholar Salon at the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology; readings included the 2023 Lit Crawl San Francisco. Monica was also invited on The Beat: A Poetry Podcast and the Mythic Podcast.
Dr. Monica Mody holds a Ph.D. in East-West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame, and is a Bachelor of Arts and Laws (Hons.) from the National Law School of India University. She was born in Ranchi, India, and lives on the Chumash coast, California. Stay in touch with her via her substack (monicamody.substack.com/).