Monica Byrne

Monica Byrne (born July 13, 1981) is an American playwright and science fiction author. She is best known for her drama What Every Girl Should Know and her debut novel The Girl in the Road, which won the 2015 James Tiptree, Jr. Award and was nominated for the Locus and Kitschies awards.

Life and career Monica Byrne was born on July 13, 1981, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The youngest of five children, she grew up in the college town of Annville, where her father was a lecturer at Lebanon Valley College. Wanting to become an astronaut and go to Mars, she became an intern at NASA. However, instead of pursuing a scientific career, she decided to become a writer.

In 2008, she attended the Clarion Workshop with Neil Gaiman. From 2012 to 2017, she was the playwright-in-residence at Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern, in Durham, North Carolina. Her plays have been performed in other theaters as well.

Her drama What Every Girl Should Know, about girls at a Catholic girls school around 1914 who worship birth control and women's rights activist Margaret Sanger, was performed in Durham, Berkeley, and New York. The title of the play is drawn from the name of Sanger's sex education column in the New York Call, published in 1912 and 1913. Robert Hurwitt of the San Francisco Chronicle remarked that "Byrne's often clever, provocative script isn't fully fleshed out" and "the swift pacing doesn't make up for how thinly Byrne has developed her story or characters". The Wall Street Journal praised it as "a new sensation, a real achievement",

Her second novel, The Actual Star (2021), takes place across three timelines − in the year 1012, in a declining Mayan kingdom; in 2012, following a young woman exploring her Belizean heritage; and in 3012, where a utopian genderless society has been established after climatic ruin destroyed much of the world. The novel was well received by critics − the New Scientist review called it a "stone-cold masterpiece", praising the pacing, characters, and societies. The Tor.com review called it "one of the most effective examples of worldbuilding you’re likely to see on a page this year", deeming it an "epic, visceral novel" that "bristles with ambition".

Byrne considers Norman Rush, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Ursula K. Le Guin as inspiration for her work. Nine Bodies of Water. In Fantasy Magazine, September 2010 Five Letters from New Laverne. In Shimmer, Number 12 (2010) Gustus Dei. In The Baffler, No 27 (2015) The Reclamation Rite of One April Nora Hess. In Gargoyle, Issue 56

Plays Miss America 1988 and The Last Human Conversation Poor Ball Nightwork (2011) The Memory Palace (2011) What Every Girl Should Know (2012) The Pentaeon (2012) Tarantino's Yellow Speedo (2014)

Non-fiction