Carmen_Maria_Machado

Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado

American writer

Carmen Maria Machado (born July 3, 1986) is an American short story author, essayist, and critic best known for Her Body and Other Parties, a 2017 short story collection, and her memoir In the Dream House, which was published in 2019 and won the 2021 Folio Prize.[3] Machado is frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award[4] and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her stories have been reprinted in Year's Best Weird Fiction[5], Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women's Erotica.

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Early life

Carmen Maria Machado was born July 3, 1986, in Allentown, Pennsylvania.[6] 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 D.C. and worked at the United States Patent Office, where he met Machado’s grandmother, who came over to the U.S. from Austria after World War II.[6]

Machado grew up in a very religious United Methodist household; this upbringing, she says, led to a sense of guilt about her queer sexuality for several years.[7]

Education

She attended Parkland High School in South Whitehall Township, Pennsylvania[8] and then American University in Washington, D.C., graduating in 2008.[1][9]

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.[10] Machado also attended the Clarion Workshop, where she studied under author Ted Chiang and others.[11]

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.[1]

Machado's short stories, essays, and criticism have been published in a number of magazines including The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, Tin House, Lightspeed Magazine, Guernica, AGNI, National Public Radio, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons,[12] 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, 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.[13][14]

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."[15] Her fiction has been a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novelette,[16] the Shirley Jackson Award,[17] 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.[18] In 2018, she won the Bard Fiction Prize.[19]

Her horror-inspired short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was published by Graywolf Press in 2017.[20] It was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for fiction,[4] won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award John Leonard Prize,[21] and was shortlisted for the 2018 Dylan Thomas Prize.[22] The collection has been optioned by FX and a television show is in development by Gina Welch.[23]

As of 2018, she is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.[24] Machado is a 2019 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship.[25] She was a Visiting associate professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in Spring 2021.[26]

Machado was guest editor of the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 edition.[27] 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.[28]

Her essay "Both Ways", about Jennifer's Body, is part of the anthology It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, published in October 2022.[29]

Personal life

Machado is queer, and lived in Philadelphia with her wife Val Howlett.[1] The two married in 2017 and maintained a non-monogamous relationship, living with their partner Marne Litfin in a throuple.[30] Howlett described the relationships in March 2022, saying, "It’s just really nice to not build your whole life around one single person. Everything from... the division of labor to how we have conflict to sharing joyful things. I just really love our lives."[30] Machado and Howlett separated later that year.[2]

Machado now lives in Brooklyn, New York City.[31]

Awards and honors

Bibliography

Short stories

  • "The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror" (Granta)
  • "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" (Harper's Bazaar)
  • "Mary When You Follow Her" (VQR)
  • "Eight Bites" (Gulf Coast)
  • "Blur" (Tin House)
  • "The Husband Stitch" (Granta)
  • "Horror Story" (Granta)
  • "Inventory" (Strange Horizons)
  • "Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead" (Lightspeed Magazine)
  • "Especially Heinous" (The American Reader)
  • "Mothers" (Interfictions)
  • "The Book of the Dead" (BBC Radio 4)
  • "Haunt" (Conjunctions)
  • "A Cat, a Bride, a Servant" (Garage)
  • "A Brief and Fearful Star" (Slate/Future Tense)
  • "Relaxation Technique" (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern)
  • "Miss Laura's School for Esquire Men" (Tin House)
  • "Vacation" (Wigleaf)
  • "The Old Women Who Were Skinned" (Fairy Tale Review)
  • "Descent" (Nightmare Magazine)
  • "My Body, Herself" (Uncanny Magazine)
  • "Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa" (Lightspeed Magazine)

Comics

  • The Low, Low Woods #1-6 (2019–2020)
    1. Bottomless (28 pages, 2019)
    2. Heaven on Earth (27 pages, 2020)
    3. The Fruiting Body (27 pages, 2020)
    4. Einstein on the Beach (26 pages, 2020)
    5. The Witch's Tale (27 pages, 2020)
    6. Bells to Rest, Lambs to Slaughter (27 pages, 2020)

Books

References

  1. [1]
    Shepard, Louisa (November 2, 2017). "Once rejected by Starbucks, writer-in-residence is a National Book Award finalist". Penn Today. University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved November 12, 2019.
  2. [2]
    Machado, Carmen Maria (19 July 2022). "Things I'm Bad At: Residencies". Cup of Stars. Substack.
  3. [3]
    "Machado wins 2021 Folio Prize". Books+Publishing. 2021-03-25. Archived from the original on 2021-03-24. Retrieved 2021-03-25.
  4. [4]
    "2017 National Book Award finalists revealed". CBS News. October 4, 2017. Retrieved 2017-10-04.
  5. [5]
    "Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2". Undertow Publications. Retrieved 2020-01-23.
  6. [6]
    "The metafictional, liminal, lyrical ways of writer Carmen Maria Machado" by Sabrina Vourvoulias, AL DÍA News, December 3, 2015.
  7. [7]
    "Interview with Carmen Maria Machado". Solstice Literary Magazine. 2016-02-03. Retrieved 2021-04-25.
  8. [8]
    "Carmen Maria Machado" at Inventaire
  9. [9]
    "Author Carmen Maria Machado on Her Time in DC and the Great Advice She Gives Young Writers | Washingtonian (DC)". Washingtonian. 2020-02-11. Retrieved 2021-03-18.
  10. [10]
    Machado, Carmen Maria. "Honors". Retrieved 3 September 2023.
  11. [11]
    "Her Body and Other Parties: An Interview with Carmen Maria Machado" by Amandine Faucheux, NDR Magazine, May 2015.
  12. [12]
    Strange Horizons
  13. [13]
    "Horror Story". Granta. 30 October 2015. Retrieved 2019-04-12.
  14. [14]
    Machado, Carmen Maria (2017). Her Body and Other Parties. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press.
  15. [15]
    Sofia Samatar, "Double Take: On Carmen Maria Machado",The Los Angeles Review of Books, April 26, 2015.
  16. [16]
    "2014 Nebula Awards Winners", Locus Magazine, June 6, 2015.
  17. [17]
    "2017 Shirley Jackson Award Winners", Shirley Jackson Awards website, accessed April 23, 2017.
  18. [18]
    Liptak, Andrew (23 August 2015). "This Is What The 2015 Hugo Ballot Should Have Been". io9. Retrieved 4 September 2023.
  19. [19]
    Relations, Bard Public. "Annual Bard Fiction Prize Is Awarded To Carmen Maria Machado | Bard College Public Relations". www.bard.edu. Retrieved 2020-02-07.
  20. [20]
    "On Carmen Maria Machado's Body Horrors". The+Millions. 12 January 2018. Retrieved 2019-04-12.
  21. [21]
    Maher, John (January 22, 2018). "2017 NBCC Awards Finalists Announced". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved January 23, 2018.
  22. [22]
    "Dylan Thomas Prize 2018 shortlist announced". Books+Publishing. Retrieved 2019-02-04.
  23. [23]
    "Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body And Other Parties Adaptation Snatched Up by FX". Jezebel. 16 October 2018. Retrieved Feb 21, 2020.
  24. [24]
    Lemieux, Elizabeth (March 2, 2018). "Carmen Maria Machado: Sitting Down with Penn's Writer–In–Residence". 34th Street. Retrieved Oct 31, 2018.
  25. [25]
    "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Carmen Maria Machado". Retrieved 2020-02-07.
  26. [26]
    "Carmen Maria Machado | Iowa Writers' Workshop | College of Liberal Arts & Sciences | The University of Iowa". writersworkshop.uiowa.edu. Retrieved 2022-05-08.
  27. [27]
    Studios, Clockpunk. "Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019". John Joseph Adams. Archived from the original on 2020-02-14. Retrieved 2020-01-23.
  28. [28]
    Latinx rising : an anthology of Latinx science fiction and fantasy. Goodwin, Matthew David,, Aldama, Frederick Luis, 1969-. Columbus. 2020. ISBN 978-0-8142-7799-7. OCLC 1157344767.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
  29. [29]
    Vallese, Joe, ed. (4 October 2022). It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror. New York, NY: The Feminist Press at CUNY. ISBN 9781952177798.
  30. [30]
    Goyanes, Rob (17 March 2022). "Carmen Maria Machado, Val Howlett and Marne Litfin Are Each Other's Editors". Cultured.
  31. [31]
    Machado, Carmen Maria. "Biography". Retrieved 3 September 2023.
  32. [32]
    "Carmen Maria Machado: Core of Darkness". locusmag.org. Locus Publications. 13 November 2023. Retrieved 29 January 2024.
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