Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado was born in 1986 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a household shaped by stories — her family’s, the ones she read obsessively, and the ones she invented. She attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has taught at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, among other institutions. She is openly queer and her work consistently examines the intersection of queerness, femininity, genre, and the politics of storytelling itself. She is a writer-in-residence at the Annenberg Foundation and a regular contributor to literary publications.
Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties (2017), announced her as one of the most original and important voices in American fiction. The collection draws on horror, fairy tale, body horror, and realist fiction to examine women’s experiences — of desire, fear, violence, love, and the strange negotiations of the female body in a world organized to contain and diminish it. The title story, ‘The Husband Stitch,’ is a feminist revision of a classic urban legend; ‘Especially Heinous’ is a surreal retelling of Law and Order: SVU episode synopses; ‘Eight Bites’ addresses body image and the violence of dieting. The collection was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the World Fantasy Award, and numerous other honors.
In the Dream House (2019), available on WritersReview, is her most celebrated and formally radical work. A memoir told in second person, structured as a choose-your-own-adventure book with chapters organized by archetype — ‘Dream House as Haunted House,’ ‘Dream House as Fairy Tale,’ ‘Dream House as Bildungsroman’ — it chronicles an abusive relationship Machado experienced with a woman, and in doing so addresses a profound gap in the cultural archive: the near-total absence of narratives about abuse within queer relationships, particularly between women. The book argues that the lack of a recognizable story is itself a form of violence — that without a map, people cannot find their way through or out of experiences for which no language exists.
In the Dream House won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, and was named by numerous publications as one of the best books of the year. It has been widely taught in courses on memoir, queer studies, and creative nonfiction, and has done significant cultural work in making queer domestic abuse visible and nameable. Its formal innovations — the second person, the genre chapters, the annotations — are not merely aesthetic choices but ethical ones, each mode of telling enacting a different way of surviving the experience being described.
Machado’s work is characterized by formal daring, a deep engagement with the history of genre fiction (especially horror and the Gothic), and a political seriousness that never sacrifices aesthetic pleasure. She is one of the essential American writers of her generation, and her influence on the shape of contemporary literary fiction, memoir, and genre fiction is already significant and growing.
