Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado (born July 3, 1986) is an American author, essayist, and critic. She is best known for her short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, and her memoir, In the Dream House, which won the 2021 Folio Prize.

Machado has been published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed, and other publications. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her stories have been reprinted in Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women's Erotica.

Early life and education

Machado was born July 3, 1986, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Machado's paternal grandfather left Santa Clara, Cuba, for the United States when he was 18, gaining U.S. citizenship after serving in the Korean War. He then moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked at the U.S. Patent Office and met Machado's grandmother, who came to the U.S. from Austria following World War II.

Machado grew up in a religious United Methodist household, which, she says, led to a sense of guilt for several years about her queer sexuality.

She attended Parkland High School in South Whitehall Township, Pennsylvania, and then American University in Washington, D.C., where she graduated in 2008 with a BA in photography.

She earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and received fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, the Speculative Literature Foundation, the University of Iowa, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Machado also attended the Clarion Workshop, where she studied under author Ted Chiang and others.

Career

Machado worked in the Iowa Writers' Workshop for two years after receiving her MFA there. After a rejection from Starbucks in 2013, she took up work at Lush, a soap store, while she taught writing as an adjunct professor at Rosemont College and other schools in the area. She also did freelance writing while she lived in Pennsylvania.

Machado's short stories, essays, and criticism have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, Tin House, Lightspeed, Guernica, AGNI, National Public Radio, Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons, and other publications. Her stories have also been reprinted in anthologies such as Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2017, Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, The Best Horror of the Year, and Best Women's Erotica. Machado's short story, "Horror Story," originally published in Granta in 2015, details a lesbian couple's difficulty coping with a haunting in their new house.

Machado's fiction has been called "strange and seductive", and it has been said that her "work doesn't just have form, it takes form." Her fiction has been a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novelette, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Franz Kafka Award in Magic Realism, the storySouth Million Writers Award, and the Calvino Prize from the Creative Writing Program at the University of Louisville. An analysis by io9 indicated that if not for the Sad Puppies ballot manipulation campaign, Machado would have been a finalist for the 2015 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. In 2018, she won the Bard Fiction Prize.

Her horror-inspired short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was published by Graywolf Press in 2017. It was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award John Leonard Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Dylan Thomas Prize. The collection has been optioned by FX and a television show is in development by Gina Welch.

As of 2018, she is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. Machado is a 2019 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. She was a Visiting associate professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in Spring 2021.

Machado was guest editor of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 edition. Her sci-fi short stories have appeared in volumes including Latinx Rising: An Anthology of Latinx Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Matthew David Goodwin, with an introduction by Frederick Luis Aldama.

Her essay "Both Ways", about the 2009 film Jennifer's Body, is part of the anthology It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, published in October 2022.

In 2022, Machado announced a new short story collection to be published by Knopf titled A Brief and Fearful Star.

Personal life

Machado is bisexual. She married Val Howlett in 2017. The pair lived in Philadelphia, and maintained a non-monogamous relationship with their partner Marne Litfin in a throuple. Machado and Howlett separated in 2022.

Machado now lives in Brooklyn, New York City.

Awards and honors

Machado was awarded the Richard Yates Short Story Prize in 2011 and was named Writer on the Rise by Philadelphia in their Best of Philly awards list.

Published Works

Memoir

In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, 2019)

Collections

Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf Press, 2017)

Short stories

"Difficult at Parties" (Unstuck, Issue 2, 2012)*

"Inventory" (Strange Horizons, 2013)*

"Vacation" (Wigleaf, 2013)

"Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU" (The American Reader, Volume 1, 2013)*

"Miss Laura's School for Esquire Men" (Tin House, 2013)

"We Were Never Alone in Space" (Shimmer, Issue 17, 2013)

"The Hungry Earth" (Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, Rosarium Publishing, 2013)

"Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa" (Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 47, 2014)

"Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead" (Help Fund My Robot Army!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, John Joseph Adams, 2014)

"We Were Never Men" (The Red Volume: An Anthology of Stories by the Awkward Robots, The Awkward Robots, 2014)

"The Husband Stitch" (Granta, 2014)*

"Mothers" (Interfictions, Issue 4, 2014)*

"Descent" (Nightmare Magazine, Issue 29, 2015)

"I Bury Myself" (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, No. 33, 2015)

"Horror Story" (Granta, 2015)