Carmen Maria Machado

In less than four years since Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection Her Body and Other Parties was published by Graywolf, she has taken the literary world by storm. A part-time adjunct writing instructor and Lush soap store employee at the time of writing the book, she was named writer-in-residence at the University of Pennsylvania After Penn professors read the unpublished manuscript of Her Body.

The book went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award, Shirley Jackson Award, and Lambda Literary Award. Critics praised Machado’s unique blend of science fiction, comedy, horror, fantasy, and fabulism. Her Body was named a best book of the decade by Rolling Stone and LitHub, earned best book of the year accolades by dozens more publications, and has been translated into more than 20 languages. It is currently in development to become an anthology TV series

Right on the heels of this success, Machado picked up her second Lambda Literary Award for her memoir In the Dream House, which tells the story of her relationship with her first girlfriend while earning an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Machado gives a raw and intimate portrait of the harrowing relationship, defying genres again by revealing her story in short fragments, each written through the lens of a different story trope or archetype—including fairy tales, Disney villains, Bildungsroman, romance novels, and lesbian cult classics. At the same time, In the Dream House dissects cultural representations of psychological abuse and addresses the silence surrounding domestic abuse in lesbian relationships.

Machado released her first comic book series, The Low, Low Woods, in 2020 from Hill House Comics. The series follows two young women who wake up in a movie theater with no memory of the past few hours of their lives as they attempt to piece together what happened and solve the mystery