Monica Sanders
Joined Atlas Obscura in 2025
Monica Sanders is a writer, explorer, professor, and lifelong seeker of strange and meaningful places. Her work follows the threads between history, landscape, culture, law, and resilience, often beginning with a simple question: what story is hiding here?
A New Orleans native and National Geographic Explorer, Monica is especially drawn to coastal towns, old cemeteries, local rituals, overlooked infrastructure, weathered buildings, and places shaped by memory. She writes about climate, technology, disaster, and communities, but she is just as happy wandering down a side street, reading a historical marker, or asking a local why something is the way it is.
For Atlas Obscura, Monica hopes to share places that reward curiosity: sites with unusual pasts, quiet beauty, and stories that make the familiar feel new again.
