"I was made at right angles to the world
and I see it so. I can only see it so."
- from "Keaton" by Elizabeth Bishop

Christina Montilla is a writer from Mountlake Terrace, Washington. She is an MFA candidate (2024) in fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in Iowa City, Iowa, where she is a Truman Capote Fellow. She currently resides in Iowa City.

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Her creative nonfiction and poetry have been published in print and online, most recently with Midnight Chem and Moss Literary Journal. 

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A broken family becomes a child's plastic ponies. An incident of terror shelled in the pit of a plum. A heartbroken woman is transformed into wallpaper. The truth of the object is how we often mistake people as objects. How can objects teach us to treat people as people again?

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She is a first-gen, working class writer from the cinderblock borders of the Emerald City; a daughter of a deported immigrant, her fiction considers the many disparate, conditional realities that weave class, race, and home politics together in the Pacific Northwest.

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Her creative nonfiction and experimental/blended genre writing has been published online with Hobart, Duende, Cascadia Rising Review, Midnight Chem, in print with Small Po[r]tions, the 2018 Till Writer's Chapbook, Papeachu Review Issue 3 and Moss volume 5. She received her B.A. in Anthropology and English/Creative Nonfiction from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA.

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Since 2009, she has been a member of La Sala Latinx Artist Collective and has collaborated with artists of many disciplines and backgrounds to bring new work to life. At the University of Iowa, she teaches creative writing, serves on the FirstGen@Iowa Student Advisory Board. Along with the poet Tia Fishler, she is co-host of IWW's Talk Art literary roast series. She is currently at work on her first collection of short stories and novel.