Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado is an American author and essayist born in 1986 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently serves as Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. Her debut short story collection Her Body and Other Parties (2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and won numerous other prizes, establishing her as one of the most exciting new voices in speculative fiction. In the Dream House (2019) is a genre-bending memoir about an abusive same-sex relationship, structured through forty-odd literary and folkloric genres — the haunted house, the choose-your-own-adventure, the fairy tale, the bildungsroman. It won the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2021 and numerous other awards, and is widely studied in gender studies and creative nonfiction courses. The book marked a significant expansion of the abuse memoir as a form. Machado's work sits at the intersection of horror, fantasy, and feminist theory. She is an artist in residence at the Sundance Institute and has been a Guggenheim Fellow.