Mona Susan Power (born 1961) is an American author from Chicago, Illinois. Her debut novel, The Grass Dancer (1994), received the 1995 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for Best First Fiction.
Power was born in Chicago, Illinois, and is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.[1] Her mother, Susan Kelly Power (Gathering of Stormclouds Woman, her Dakota name), is also an enrolled member. Her great-grandmother was Nellie Two Bear Gates.[2] She is a descendant of Sioux Chief Mato Nupa (Two Bears).[3] Her father, Carleton Gilmore Power, is of New England Euro-American descent and worked as a salesman in publishing. One of his great-great-grandfathers was governor of New Hampshire.[3] She heard stories that inspired her imagination from both sides. Power attended local schools, then earned her bachelor's degree from Harvard University and a JD from Harvard Law School.
After a short career in law, Power decided to become a writer. She worked as a technical writer and editor, reserving her creative writing for off hours. In 1992 she entered the MFA program at the Iowa Writer's Workshop.[4]
Her 1994 debut novel, The Grass Dancer, has a complex plot about four generations of Native Americans, with action stretching from 1864 to 1986. The work received the 1995 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for Best First Fiction.
Power has written several other books as well. Her short fiction has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Voice Literary Supplement, Ploughshares,[5] Story, and The Best American Short Stories 1993. She teaches at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Power's most recent novel, A Council of Dolls, was released in 2023. The novel is longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction.[6][7]