Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado was raised by her parents in Allentown, an hour north of Philadelphia. Her father was the son of two immigrants, with his own father moving to the United States from Cuba at the age of 18.[7] Machado's grandfather worked in the US Patent Office and met his future wife when she immigrated to the U.S. from Austria after World War II.[7]

Machado grew up in a very religious United Methodist household, and this upbringing led to her feeling guilty about her sexuality for several years.[8]

Machado completed her undergraduate studies in 2008[9] and received her bachelor's degree from the American University in Washington D.C.[10] Machado earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has 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.[5] Machado also attended the Clarion Workshop where she studied under authors such as Ted Chiang.[11]

Machado says her writing has been influenced by Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Helen Oyeyemi, and Yōko Ogawa.[11] In particular, Machado says she was heavily influenced by Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was given to her to read by an "insightful and amazing English teacher" when she was in the 10th grade of high school.[12]

Machado worked in the Iowa Writer's Workshop for two years after receiving her MFA. She met her now wife Val Howlett while in Iowa. 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.[9]

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, 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,[2] 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]

Machado was Guest Editor of the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 edition.[26] 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.[27]

Machado does not have prologues in her books, or the prologues are very short as she finds prologues to be "tedious".[28] Although her writing references many different genres,[10] much of her work carries dystopian or horror undertones, a reference to her influence by Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson. Although she does not consider herself to be very religious, some of her writings that fall under the magical genre were inspired by her imagination that developed as a result of her religious upbringing.[29]

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• Carmen Maria Machado at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database