Dantiel W. Moniz

“Reading one of Moniz’s stories is like holding your breath underwater while letting the salt sting your fresh wounds. It’s exhilarating and shocking and even healing. The power in these stories rests in their veracity, vitality and vulnerability.” —Washington Post

“Life’s inflection points, mundane but universal, mark the Black and brown Floridians who populate these stories… the ordinary experience of being female is laced with a kind of enchantment. Entire stories seem bathed in a warm radiance. One can glow with both love and rage.” —New York Times

Dantiel W. Moniz is the author of the collection Milk Blood Heat (Grove Press, 2021), a finalist for the PEN/ Jean Stein Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and The Story Prize. Her novel Beholder is forthcoming with Scribner in 2027.

Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story in Milk Blood Heat delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning. On the title of this debut work, Moniz said: “These are really elemental words, but they’re also the elements that make up human life. Milk that nourishes you, blood that runs through your body, and anything living has heat or needs heat to live. Those words become a totem throughout the rest of the book…I definitely am also writing about larger systems in the collection—about capitalism and what it does to how we live as humans.”

Moniz is a 2024 USA Fellow, the recipient of a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, and Fellowships from Yaddo, The Lighthouse Works, and MacDowell, among others. Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s Bazaar, American Short Fiction, Tin House, and elsewhere.

Moniz is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches fiction.

Read What’s In Print 

• Complicated Love: Dantiel W. Moniz Interviewed – BOMB Magazine

• The Geography of Introspection: A Conversation with Dantiel W. Moniz – Split Lip Magazine

• Dantiel W. Moniz’s Milk Blood Heat is a Debut to Remember – Chicago Review of Books

• The Single Sentence Is Supreme: A Conversation with Dantiel W. Moniz – LA Review of Books

Listen to Audio 

• Dantiel W. Moniz on Writing Stories That Are Felt in the Body – Literary Hub

• Daniel Moniz: A Dialogue on Writing – First Draft

Exotics (originally published in O, the Oprah Magazine)

Among themselves, the members called it the Supper Club; to us it was only our J-O-B, and no one, not them or us, spoke of it outside of the building’s walls. Concealed in the center of the city in a plain, tan-brick building that could have been the dentist’s or the tax attorney’s office, the club was exclusive in the way that too much money made things. We couldn’t have joined—not that we wanted to, we often said. Even if our fathers had handed us riches from their fathers and their grandfathers before them, made off of the lives and deaths of black and brown bodies, none of us would want to be complicit in such terrible opulence; we only swept up the place.

We took the jobs. Of course we took the jobs. We were citizens with citizens’ needs: food and housing and medical care. Our children wanted and we desired they be allowed their want, that they sometimes have it satisfied. We didn’t ask for much, much less than the members themselves, only that we might afford to be human, and in this way, the pay, cash in hand, was hard to beat.

Once a month, the members gathered in the night, wearing elaborate half-face masks in the likenesses of pigs and dogs and cats that hid their eyes but left their mouths free. While we poured tart cherry mead, fetched fresh cloth napkins, procured new spoons for ones that had fallen, we observed them: a walrus tipping back raw oysters; a big-eyed cow knifing marmalade onto toast; a peacock shimmering in a gold dress, sloshing pink champagne onto the floor. We cleaned it up. We swept crumbs from the linen. We cleared plates between courses and some of us might have drawn our fingers through ribbons of decorative sauce or nudged unbitten nibbles into the palms of our hands. If we caught one another doing so, we pretended that we hadn’t. At every dinner, our faces were bare; the members wanted to know us, though they pretended we had no power. We didn’t know that we did. They conversed around us as if speaking through air, and we came to know most intimately what they thought about the world. One night, over fugu ceviche, a jackal said: The Revolution was never about freedom. We just wanted more kings.

They were the kings, so they laughed.

The Supper Club specialized in exotic meats—the dining table raised on a platform, the eating itself the art. The members devoured main courses of stuffed gator over dirty rice, emu in raspberry sauce, anaconda slivered into hearty stew, and slabs of roasted lion they joked came direct from Pride Rock. They declared ortolan passé, though once we witnessed the tiny bodies disappear beneath the further shroud of napkins, and through their wet smacking, heard the crunch of delicate skulls. They were jeweled animals eating lesser animals, and to each other, with our eyes, we communicated our disgust. We did not prepare the food or choose it. Of course, we served them; we did only our jobs. We fed our children and kept the roofs above their heads. We watched the members gorge themselves in January, February, March and April and May. We collected our unmarked envelopes as they licked extravagant gravy from their fingers.

In November the members cried, Next month must be the rarest! Bigger, better! We deserve! Their mouths always watering for the next meal before they’d finished the last. A panda draped her arm across the gilded chair of a buffalo, her husband, and said, For Christmas let’s have something truly special. Maybe the last of something, and us the only ones to taste.

On the night of the last supper, while we set the table with crystal stemware and festooned mistletoe above the archways, we heard the sleepy cries from the kitchen, the shh-shhshing of the chefs. We heard the lullabies, ones that had been sung to us and that we now sang, the melodies cleaving down to our bones. We were angry! Of course we were. We didn’t want this. We didn’t condone it—but what could we do? We brought the dishes to the table to gasps of nearly erotic anticipation and stepped back and dropped our eyes. If we didn’t look, we could still pretend. Their silverware filled the room with music.

My God, we heard a canary say quietly to a sheep, her hands at her mouth. We knew, if they could, they’d eat Him, too.

And afterward, once the floors were clean, the table stripped, the dishes washed and the cutlery polished, once it seemed that the club had never been, we stood in line for our money. As a bonus, a nod to the year of our dedicated service, each of us was given a white bag as we left by the back door. Merry Christmas, the chefs said. Bon appétit. We took the bags; we tucked them under our coats. None of us spoke. What could we say? In the parking lot, stepping into our used cars, avoiding each other’s eyes, we shrugged. We excused ourselves. Anyway, we might have thought, haven’t we always eaten the young?

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