Monica Westin is a writer and historian of rhetoric by training. Her art writing has appeared in Frieze, BOMB, and Artforum, among other places. She teaches in the graduate program in Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts and works by day in an academic library at the University of California. She is at work on a science fiction novel that takes place from the point of view of a plant and a dead cow in the crisis of third century Rome.