Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado
Machado in 2017
Born	(1986-07-03) July 3, 1986 Allentown, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Education	American University (BA) Iowa Writers' Workshop (MFA)
Occupation	Writer
Spouse	Val Howlett ​ ​ (separated)​
Writing career
Language	English
Years active	2011–present
Genres	Science fiction, fantasy, horror
Notable works	Her Body and Other Parties (2017) In the Dream House (2019)
Notable awards	National Book Critics Circle Award (2017) Shirley Jackson Award (2017) Crawford Award (2018) Lambda Literary Award (2018) Folio Prize (2021)
Website	carmenmariamachado.com

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 at AWP 2026

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

Year	Title	Award	Category	Result	Ref
2014	"The Husband Stitch"	Nebula Award	Novelette	Shortlisted
		Shirley Jackson Award	Novelette	Shortlisted
2015		Otherwise Award	—	Longlisted
	—	John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer	—	Longlisted
2017	Her Body and Other Parties	Bisexual Book Award	Fiction	Won
		Kirkus Prize	Fiction	Shortlisted
		Los Angeles Times Book Prize	Art Seidenbaum Award	Shortlisted
		National Book Award	Fiction	Finalist
		National Book Critics Circle Award	John Leonard Prize	Won
		Otherwise Award	—	Honor List
		Shirley Jackson Award	Collection	Won
2018		Bard Fiction Prize	—	Won
		Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize	Fiction	Won
		Crawford Award	—	Won
		Dylan Thomas Prize	—	Shortlisted
		Indies Choice Book Awards	Adult Debut	Won
		Lambda Literary Award	Lesbian Fiction	Won
		Locus Award	Collection	Nominated
		PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize	—	Shortlisted
		Publishing Triangle Awards	Edmund White Award	Shortlisted
		NAIBA Book of the Year	Fiction	Won
		World Fantasy Award	Collection	Shortlisted
2019	In the Dream House	Bisexual Book Award	Biography and Memoir	Won
		Goodreads Choice Award	Memoir & Autobiography	Nominated
2020		ALA Over the Rainbow Book List	—	Top 10
		Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence	Nonfiction	Longlisted
		BookTube Prize	Nonfiction	Finalist
		Goldie Award	General Non-Fiction	Won
		Heartland Booksellers Award	Nonfiction	Shortlisted
		Lambda Literary Award	Nonfiction	Won
		Publishing Triangle Awards	Judy Grahn Award	Won
		Reading Women Award	Nonfiction	Shortlisted
		Stonewall Book Award	Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award	Honor
		William Saroyan International Prize for Writing	Nonfiction	Shortlisted
2021		PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction	—	Longlisted
		Folio Prize/The Writers' Prize	—	Won

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)
• "The Old Women Who Were Skinned" (Fairy Tale Review, Issue 12, 2016)
• "My Body, Herself" (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 12, 2016)
• "The House at the End of the World" (Fantastic Stories of the Imagination People of Color, Positronic Publishing, 2017)
• "Blur" (Summer Reading, Issue 72, 2017)
• "Promise Me" (Great Jones Street Originals, 2017)
• "Eight Bites Archived October 15, 2024, at the Wayback Machine" (Gulf Coast, Issue 29.2, 2017)*
• "There and Back Again" (Mixed Up, Skyhorse, 2017)
• "Mary When You Follow Her" (VQR, 2018)
• "A Brief and Fearful Star" (Future Tense, 2018)
• "A Cat, a Bride, a Servant" (Garage, Issue 15, 2018)
• "The Resident" (The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, Mariner Books, 2018)*
• "Haunt" (Conjunctions, 2019)
• "The Book of the Dead" (BBC Radio 4, 2019)
• "The Things Eric Eats Before He Eats Himself" (The Mythic Dream, Saga Press, 2019)
• "Relaxation Technique" (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue 53, 2019)
• "The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror" (Granta, 2020)
• "Justice" (The Chronicles of Now, 2020)
• "A Hundred Miles and a Mile" (When Things Get Dark, Titan Books, 2021)
• "Bloody Summer" (Amazon Original Stories, 2022)
• "Endlings" (Conjunctions, 2024)

*Also appears in Her Body and Other Parties (2017)

Comics

• The Low, Low Woods #1-6 (DC Comics, 2019–2020)

1. Bottomless (2019)
2. Heaven on Earth (2020)
3. The Fruiting Body (2020)
4. Einstein on the Beach (2020)
5. The Witch's Tale (2020)
6. Bells to Rest, Lambs to Slaughter (2020)

Collected hardcover edition published 2020

Poetry

• "Meat Eater No. 5" (The New Yorker, 2023)

Essays

• "Luxury Shopping from the Other Side of the Register" (The New Yorker, 2013)
• "The Afterlife of Pia Farrenkopf" (The New Yorker, 2014)
• "O Adjunct! My Adjunct!" (The New Yorker, 2015)
• "A Girl's Guide to Sexual Purity" (Los Angeles Review of Books, 2015)
• "The Moon Over the River Lethe" (Catapult, 2016)
• "The Morals of the Stories" (Tiny Donkey, 2016)
• "How I Should Have Known Trump Would Be Elected President" (HTMLGiant, 2016)
• "The Trash Heap Has Spoken" (Guernica, 2017)
• "Gaslit Nation" (Medium, 2017)
• "Unruly, Adjective" (Medium, 2018)
• "The Anxiety That Binds" (The New York Times, 2018)
• "Household Object: Taxidermied Alligator Head" (The Believer, 2018)
• "A Dear and Nothing Else" (March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women, Library of America, 2019)
• "What Does Pride Mean Now?" (The New York Times, 2020)
• "An Inquiry" (Horse Girls: Recovering, Aspiring, and Devoted Riders Redefine the Iconic Bond, HarperCollins, 2021)
• "Both Ways" (It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, Feminist Press, 2022)
• "The Shot That Made Me Gay" (The Metrograph, Issue 1, 2024)

As Editor

• PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019 (Catapult, 2019)
• The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (Mariner Books, 2019)
• Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (Lanternfish Press, 2019)
• BAX 2020: Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press, 2020)
• Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games (Graywolf Press, 2023)

External links

• Official website
• Carmen Maria Machado at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database