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Carmen Maria Machado

Biography

Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the memoir IN THE DREAM HOUSE and the short story collection HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."

Her essays, fiction and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, VQR, Conjunctions, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Michener-Copernicus Foundation, Elizabeth George Foundation, CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

Carmen Maria Machado

Books by Carmen Maria Machado

In the Dream House: A Memoir
by Carmen Maria Machado - Memoir, Nonfiction

Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Carmen Maria Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives IN THE DREAM HOUSE its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope --- the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman --- through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.

Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
by Carmen Maria Machado - Fiction, Short Stories

In HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts and girls-with-bells-for-eyes.