Monalisa's writing career really began when she taught herself English by reading and translating Heinlein juveniles at the public library. She would copy sentences in English, translate them into Romanian, and then write out new words ten times, filling entire notebooks and giving herself a helluva writing callous. After she devoured the juvenile section, she moved on to the grown-up books. 

Her second writing career was technical, scientific, and academic in nature but she left it all behind when she decided to fulfill her life-long dream to write science fiction. 

She made her first professional sale to Kristine Katherine Rusch, a short story called Pretending to Sleep, but her first published work was Bellona's Gift in Terra Nova. Since then she's self-published novels and novellas in her Ravages of Honor epic space opera series and her short stories have been published in Laurell K. Hamilton's Fantastic Hope and several Baen anthologies including The Founder Effect, World Breakers, Robosoldiers, and The Ross 248 Project.

While space opera is her favorite genre to write, she considers herself genre-fluid and has written both hard and military science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, Romance, as well as contemporary Literature.

She is currently working on sequels, both to Threading the Needle and in her Ravages of Honor series.

Monalisa graduated from ASU with dreams of becoming an astrophysicist but went to work for Motorola instead. She designed and tested semiconductors, worked on an engineering master’s degree, and then decided to tackle the hardest job on Earth--motherhood. When her kids were old enough to go to school she kept herself busy by doing volunteer work at a hospital and was recruited to run radiation oncology and nuclear medicine research programs.  www.monalisafoster.com