Carmen Maria Machado

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, 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.

Carmen Maria Machado
Machado in 2017
Born	(1986-07-03) July 3, 1986 (age 38) Allentown, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Occupation	Writer
Language	English
Education	American University[1] Iowa Writers' Workshop (MFA)
Genre	Science fiction, fantasy, horror
Years active	2011–present
Notable works	Her Body and Other Parties (2017) In the Dream House (2019)
Notable awards	Folio Prize 2021 winner National Book Award finalist
Spouse	Val Howlett[1] ​ ​ (separated[2])​
Website
carmenmariamachado.com

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, 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, 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.^[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 the 2009 film Jennifer's Body, is part of the anthology It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, published in October 2022.^[29]

In 2022, it was announced that a new short story collection would be published by Machado at Knopf, titled A Brief and Fearful Star.^[30]

Personal life

Machado is bisexual.^[31] Until 2022, she lived in Philadelphia with her then-wife Val Howlett.^[1] The two married in 2017 and maintained a non-monogamous relationship, living with their partner Marne Litfin in a throuple.^[32] 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."^[32] Machado and Howlett separated later that year.^[2]

Machado now lives in Brooklyn, New York City.^[33]

Awards and honors

Year	Title	Award	Category	Result	Ref[34][35][36]
2014	"The Husband Stitch"	Nebula Award	Novelette	Shortlisted	[37]
		Shirley Jackson Award	Novelette	Shortlisted	[38]
2015		Otherwise Award	—	Longlisted	[39]
	—	John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer	—	Longlisted	[40]
2017	Her Body and Other Parties	Bisexual Book Award	Fiction	Won	[41]
		Kirkus Prize	Fiction	Shortlisted	[41]
		Los Angeles Times Book Prize	Art Seidenbaum Award	Shortlisted	[42]
		National Book Award	Fiction	Shortlisted	[41]
		National Book Critics Circle Award	John Leonard Prize	Won	[41]
		Otherwise Award	—	Honor List	[43]
		Shirley Jackson Award	Collection	Won	[41]
2018		Bard Fiction Prize	—	Won	[41]
		Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize	Fiction	Won	[44]
		Crawford Award	—	Won	[41]
		Dylan Thomas Prize	—	Shortlisted	[42]
		Indies Choice Book Awards	Adult Debut	Won	[41]
		Lambda Literary Award	Lesbian Fiction	Won	[41]
		Locus Award	Collection	Nominated—4th	[45]
		PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize	—	Shortlisted	[41]
		Publishing Triangle Awards	Edmund White Award	Shortlisted	[46]
		NAIBA Book of the Year	Fiction	Won	[47]
		World Fantasy Award	Collection	Shortlisted	[43]
2019	In the Dream House	Bisexual Book Award	Biography and Memoir	Won	[48]
		Goodreads Choice Award	Memoir & Autobiography	Nominated—12th	[49]
2020		ALA Over the Rainbow Book List	—	Top 10	[50][51]
		Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence	Nonfiction	Longlisted	[52][53]
		BookTube Prize	Nonfiction	Finalist	[54]
		Goldie Award	General Non-Fiction	Won	[55]
		Heartland Booksellers Award	Nonfiction	Shortlisted	[56]
		Lambda Literary Award	Nonfiction	Won	[57][58]
		Publishing Triangle Awards	Judy Grahn Award	Won	[59]
		Reading Women Award	Nonfiction	Shortlisted	[60]
		Stonewall Book Award	Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award	Honor	[61]
		William Saroyan International Prize for Writing	Nonfiction	Shortlisted	[62]
2021		PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction	—	Longlisted	[63][64]
		Rathbones Folio Prize	—	Won	[65][66]

Machado was awarded the Richard Yates Short Story Prize in 2011^[67] and was named Writer on the Rise by Philadelphia in their Best of Philly awards list.^[68]

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" (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)
• BAX 2020: Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press, 2020)
• Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games (Graywolf Press, 2023)