Monique Mansour is a first-generation Iraqi-Chaldean American and was born and raised in Southern California. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from UC Riverside, and a BA in Screenwriting and Sociology from Loyola Marymount University before serving as a Fulbright Scholar in Malta, where she taught Creative Writing to middle grade students and lectured in Rhetorical Studies at the University of Malta. She’s a Professor of Rhetoric at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She’s working on a few TV projects, and is in process of co-authoring a novel based in-part by her cultural upbringing as an Iraqi-Chaldean American.