Mona Figure

MONA FIGURE BIOGRAPHY

Mona Figure's first job out of high school was for a daily newspaper, and she's been writing ever since. She worked for the Los Angeles Times in its heyday. Later as a free-lancer, she wrote short stories and features for magazines and trade journals.

Mona gave up free-lancing and seriour writing to join TRW (now part of Northrop-Grumman). Here she supervised group writing by engineers and scientists as a proposal systems engineer though her degrees are in the arts (BA English and history, U. of Miami; graduate work in Islamic studies, UCLA).

During a 25-year career at TRW, she worked on such scientific spacecraft as Pioneer (first to leave the solar system), Mars Biology Instrument (first to land on Mars to search for life), and the Hubble Space Telescope. She also worked on earth-orbiting satellites that were the harbingers of sky computing, vehicle navigation, and satellite TV, radio and phone.

When she retired from TRW, she returned to serious writing. She enrolled in UCLA's Writers Program, completing 20 courses, mostly in advanced novel writing. Several medical challenges threatened to end her studies but she persevered, going to classes and working on her novel through two mastectomies, three lung cancer surgeries, and several other operations. She has been cancer-free for four years.

Mona lives in southern California but her roots are in Enfield, Conn., the Riverview of her novel, Laughing Not to Cry. She summers in northern Idaho and loves to hike, fish and canoe.