Carmen Maria Machado

The 2025-26 Distinguished Visiting Writer

Carmen Maria Machado with colourful geometric shapes

Award-winning and bestselling author

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."

Her essays, fiction, poetry, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York TimesGrantaVogue, This American Life, Harper’s BazaarTin HouseMcSweeney's Quarterly ConcernThe BelieverGuernicaBest American Science Fiction & FantasyBest American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the former Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.

The cover of Carmen Maria Machado's book In the Dream House