Background

Ethnicity: Carmen Maria Machado's father was the son of two immgrants from Cuba.

Carmen Maria Machado was born on July 3, 1986, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, United States. She grew up in the suburbs of Allentown and found its beauty very interesting and mysterious. Growing up in a household where story-telling was always popular, she learned stories through reading as well as an oral tradition in her family.

As a kid, she thought a lot about monsters and demons. She had this recurring dream that something was pursuing her.

Education

During her school years, Machado was always cranky about the required reading. She was disappointed with the books they had to read in English class because they read a lot of Hemingway, and she hates Hemingway. And then one day her teacher came in with books from her personal library - One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, The Awakening, some Henry James. Machado went home and read them and her mind just broke open.

In college, she took writing classes and had a wonderful teacher who told her work was interesting and she had potential. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 2012. Machado also attended the Clarion Workshop where she studied under Ted Chiang.

Career

Carmen Maria Machado began her writing career in 2011. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Tin House, Harper’s Bazaar, VQR, Conjunctions, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and elsewhere. Her work was also anthologized in Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2018 Selection, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018 Selection, Best American Essays 2018 Notable Essay, Best American Short Stories 2018 Distinguished Story, Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Selection, Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2017 Selection, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, The New Voices of Fantasy Selection, Year's Best Weird Fiction, Pushcart Prize XL: The Best of the Small Presses Honorable Mention, Best American Essays 2016 Notable Essay, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Notable Story, and Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017 Notable Story.

Carmen Maria Machado’s first book was a short story collection Her Body and Other Parties (2017). It includes stories "The Husband Stitch", "Inventory", "Mothers", "Especially Heinous", "Real Women Have Bodies", "Eight Bites", "The Resident", and "Difficult At Parties". Her next book, Dream House (2019) is a memoir of her toxic relationship with her first girlfriend and a history of queer domestic violence with chapters that dance between genres. As in her 2017 book, she explores subjects many would rather avoid. Her debut limited-run comics series, The Low, Low Woods, is forthcoming. Now Carmen Maria Machado is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.

Achievements

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  Carmen Maria Machado is the recipient of numerous awards such as Bard Fiction Prize, John Leonard Award, Crawford Award, Shirley Jackson Award, Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, American Booksellers Association's Indies Choice Book Award, New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association's Book of the Year, Bisexual Book Award for Fiction, Richard Yates Short Story Prize, and Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize.
  
  She was a finalist of National Book Award, LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, Kirkus Prize, Calvino Prize, World Fantasy Award, Nebula Award, Franz Kafka Award in Magic Realism, Million Writers Award, Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction, Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, Tiptree Award, The Dylan Thomas Prize, Bisexual Book Award for Best Writer of the Year, and Locus Award. She was longlisted for The Story Prize, John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and Hugo Award.
  
  She received Guggenheim Fellowship, The Elizabeth George Foundation, Speculative Literature Foundation Diverse Writers Grant, CINTAS Foundation Fellowship, Michener-Copernicus Foundation, The Wallace Foundation. She has been awarded residencies from Headlands Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Millay Colony for the Arts, Playa, Spruceton Inn, Wurlitzer Foundation, and Yaddo. In 2018, the New York Times listed Carmen Maria Machado's book Her Body and Other Parties as one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."

Works

More photos

• book

  • In the Dream House

    (In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing a...)

    2019
  • Her Body and Other Parties

    (In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blith...)

    2017

Views

Carmen Maria Machado wanted at first to be a doctor and then a journalist. She reads a lot of Lois Duncan, Christopher Pike, and R.L. Stein. The authors that she finds instructive are Lidia Yuknavitch, Roxane Gay, Leslie Jamison, Dodie Bellamy, Jenny Zhang, Samantha Irby, and Maggie Nelson. She also likes Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Alice Kim, Helen Oyeyemi, Karen Russell, Bennett Sims, and Jeff Vandermeer. Her influences are Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Helen Oyeyemi, Yōko Ogawa, and Gabriel García Márquez.

Quotations: "I’m always reading, I’m always researching, I’m always on the lookout."

"Yes, the world is full of good people, but it’s also full of people who will think nothing of crumpling you up into a little ball."

"Everybody cries in relationships, but if you’re crying every single day of every week of every month, that’s not normal."

"I have been writing basically my whole life. My family read to me a lot, and my grandfather’s Cuban, so there was a lot of storytelling in our household. I learned about stories through that oral tradition and through reading, and as soon as I was able to pick up a pen I was writing "books" and "stories."

"My imagination is very vivid, and I feel like life is a little surreal already, so when I’m writing from my own experiences, I’m really just pushing the situation in the story slightly further than what I perceived in reality."

"I’m really interested in writing about sex. I feel like it’s not often done well, and it’s sometimes done outrageously. I also get annoyed when writers are afraid to show pleasure."

"Horror is one of my favorite genres because it’s so limber."

"I think I’d love teaching even if it didn’t inform my writing - I find working with students to be incredibly exciting and satisfying - but it’s certainly a nice bonus."

"Beauty is about your pleasure and satisfaction, and no one else’s."

Personality

Machado is obsessed with perfume and has a growing collection of beautiful bottles. She loves how each fragrance smells a certain way in the bottle, but different notes get thrown off on the skin.

She’s obsessed with clothes but before she dressed plainly and never wore makeup, and nothing ever fit her quite right.

Her favorite places to shop are Universal Standard, Beth Ditto’s line, Modcloth and Pinup Girl Clothing.

She takes long showers and uses that time to meditate on whatever she’s working on. She even has a waterproof pad of paper in the shower so she jots down notes.

Physical Characteristics: As a child, Carmen had a sleep disturbance. She had sleep paralysis when she would wake up and was unable to move her body for a minute. She also had "exploding head syndrome," when she's falling asleep and heard this sound in her head.

Carmen Maria Machado has tattoos. On her left arm, it says "Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be." On her right, it says "She didn’t look back, but stepped off the edge of the known world."

Connections

Carmen Maria Machado is married to Val Howlett.

Wife:

Val Howlett

Val Howlett has a Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her fiction has appeared in Lunch Ticket and Hunger Mountain, and she is a recipient of the Katherine Paterson Prize for young adults.