Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado is an essayist, critic, and fiction writer. Her work defies and blends genres such as surrealism, fantasy, and horror to create writing that is so palpable it seems alive. Carmen learned about stories through reading as well as oral tradition in her family. She holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she continues to facilitate her imagination and creative subconscious in her writing today. Her spellbinding debut short story collection, “Her Body and Other Parties,” was longlisted for the National Book Award before it was even published. It ended up as a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and it was the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. The New York Times says of the collection, “It’s a wild thing, this book, covered in sequins and scales, blazing with the influence of fabulists from Angela Carter to Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi…” She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife. Her memoir, “In the Dream House,” is forthcoming in October.