Malena Watrous is a writer and an instructor of creative writing. Her first novel, If You Follow Me, won the Michener-Copernicus Award and was a Lambda finalist. She co-authored a cookbook, My Mexico City Kitchen, with Gabriela Camara. She has taught workshops in both fiction and nonfiction at Barnard College and USF, and currently works as a Lead instructor for Stanford’s Continuing Studies Online writing program, where she co-founded and directs the Online Writing Certificate program in the novel.

She is the mother of one son, Max, as well as the caretaker of two furry muses: an overweight Siamese cat (Stormtrooper, or “Stormo”) and a Pit-huahua pandemic puppy named Lucy. When she’s not working on her novel, she’s a maker of things that can be finished (and often consumed) in a shorter span of time. She has dabbled in papermaking, pie baking, metalsmithing, and (most often) enjoys sewing the clothes that she wears (as well as shopping for the fabric, which is its own hobby).